Breaking in upon these highly serious reflexions, which were absorbing the whole of Clelia's mind, the complimentary speeches which always surrounded her seemed to her even more distasteful than usual. To escape from them she went across to an open window, half-screened by a taffeta curtain; she hoped that no one would be so bold as to follow her into this sort of sanctuary. This window opened upon a little grove of orange trees planted in the ground: as a matter of fact, every winter they had to be protected by a covering, Clelia inhaled with rapture the scent of their blossom, and this pleasure seemed to restore a little calm to her spirit. "I felt that he had a very noble air," she thought, "but to inspire such passion in so distinguished a woman! She has had the glory of refusing the Prince's homage, and if she had deigned to consent, she would have reigned as queen over his States. . . . My father says that the Sovereign's passion went so far as to promise to marry her if ever he became free to do so. . . . And this love for Fabrizio has lasted so long! For it is quite five years since we met them by the Lake of Como. . . . Yes, it is quite five years," she said to herself after a moment's reflexion. "I was struck by it even then, when so many things passed unnoticed before my childish eyes. How those two ladies seemed to admire Fabrizio! . . ."
Clelia remarked with joy that none of the young men who had been speaking to her with such earnestness had ventured to approach her balcony. One of them, the Marchese Crescenzi, had taken a few steps in that direction, but had then stopped by a card-table. "If only," she said to herself, "under my window in ourpalazzoin the fortress, the only one that has any shade, I had some pretty orange trees like these to look at, my thoughts would be less sad: but to have as one's sole outlook the huge blocks of stone of the Torre Farnese. . . . Ah!" she cried with a convulsive movement, "perhaps that is where they have put him. I must speak about it at once to Don Cesare! He will be less severe than the General. My father is certain to tell me nothing on our way back to the fortress, but I shall find out everything from Don Cesare. . . . I have money, I could buy a few orange trees, which, placed under the window of my aviary, would prevent me from seeing that great wall of the Torre Farnese. How infinitely more hateful still it will be to me now that I know one of the people whom it hides from the light of day! . . . Yes, it is just the third time I have seen him. Once at court, at the ball on the Princess's birthday; to-day, hemmed in by three constables, while that horrible Barbone was begging for handcuffs to be put on him, and the other time by the Lake of Como. That is quite five years ago. What a hang-dog air he had then! How he stared at the constables, and what curious looks his mother and his aunt kept giving him. Certainly there must have been some secret that day, some special knowledge which they were keeping to themselves; at the time, I had an idea that he too was afraid of the police. . . ." Clelia shuddered; "But how ignorant I was! No doubt at that time the Duchessa had already begun to take an interest in him. How he made us laugh after the first few minutes, when the ladies, in spite of their obvious anxiety, had begun to grow more accustomed to the presence of a stranger! . . . And this evening I had not a word to say in reply when he spoke to me. . . . O ignorance and timidity! How often you have the appearance of the blackest cowardice! And I am like this at twenty, yes and past twenty! . . . I was well-advised to think of the cloister; really I am good for nothing but retirement. 'Worthy daughter of a gaoler!' he will have been saying to himself. He despises me, and, as soon as he is able to write to the Duchessa, he will tell her of my want of consideration, and the Duchessa will think me a very deceitful little girl; for, after all, this evening she must have thought me full of sympathy with her in her trouble."
Clelia noticed that someone was approaching, apparently with the intention of taking his place by her side on the iron balcony of this window; she could not help feeling annoyed, although she blamed herself for being so; the meditations in which she was disturbed were by no means without their pleasant side. "Here comes some troublesome fellow to whom I shall give a warm welcome!" she thought. She was turning her head with a haughty stare, when she caught sight of the timid face of the Archbishop who was approaching the balcony by a series of almost imperceptible little movements. "This saintly man has no manners," thought Clelia. "Why come and disturb a poor girl like me? My tranquillity is the only thing I possess." She was greeting him with respect, but at the same time with a haughty air, when the prelate said to her:
"Signorina, have you heard the terrible news?"
The girl's eyes had at once assumed a totally different expression; but, following the instructions repeated to her a hundred times over by her father, she replied with an air of ignorance which the language of her eyes loudly contradicted:
"I have heard nothing, Monsignore."
"My First Grand Vicar, poor Fabrizio del Dongo, who is no more guilty than I am of the death of that brigand Giletti, has been arrested at Bologna where he was living under the assumed name of Giuseppe Bossi; they have shut him up in your citadel; he arrived there actuallychainedto the carriage that brought him. A sort of gaoler, named Barbone, who was pardoned some time ago after murdering one of his own brothers, chose to attempt an act of personal violence against Fabrizio, but my young friend is not the man to take an insult quietly. He flung his infamous adversary to the ground, whereupon they cast him into a dungeon, twenty feet underground, after first putting handcuffs on his wrists."
"Not handcuffs, no!"
"Ah! Then you do know something," cried the Archbishop. And the old man's features lost their intense expression of discouragement. "But, before we go any farther, someone may come out on to this balcony and interrupt us: would you be so charitable as to convey personally to Don Cesare my pastoral ring here?"
The girl took the ring, but did not know where to put it for fear of losing it.
"Put it on your thumb," said the Archbishop; and he himself slipped the ring into position. "Can I count upon you to deliver this ring?"
"Yes, Monsignore."
"Will you promise me to keep secret what I am going to say, even if circumstances should arise in which you may find it inconvenient to agree to my request?"
"Why, yes, Monsignore," replied the girl, trembling all over as she observed the sombre and serious air which the old man had suddenly assumed. . . .
"Our estimable Archbishop," she went on, "can give me no orders that are not worthy of himself and me."
"Say to Don Cesare that I commend to him my adopted son; I know that thesbirriwho carried him off did not give him time to take his breviary with him, I therefore request Don Cesare to let him have his own, and if your uncle will send to-morrow to my Palace, I promise to replace the book given by him to Fabrizio. I request Don Cesare also to convey the ring which this pretty hand is now wearing to Signor del Dongo." The Archbishop was interrupted by General Fabio Conti, who came in search of his daughter to take her to the carriage; there was a brief interval of conversation in which the prelate shewed a certain adroitness. Without making any reference to the latest prisoner, he so arranged matters that the course of the conversation led naturally to the utterance of certain moral and political maxims by himself; for instance: "There are moments of crisis in the life of a court which decide for long periods the existence of the most exalted personages; it would be distinctly imprudent to change intopersonal hatredthe state of political aloofness which is often the quite simple result of diametrically opposite positions." The Archbishop, letting himself be carried away to some extent by the profound grief which he felt at so unexpected an arrest, went so far as to say that one must undoubtedly strive to retain the position one holds, but that it would be a quite gratuitous imprudence to attract to oneself furious hatreds in consequence of lending oneself to certain actions which are never forgotten.
When the General was in the carriage with his daughter: "Those might be described as threats," he said to her. . . . "Threats, to a man of my sort!"
No other words passed between father and daughter for the next twenty minutes.
On receiving the Archbishop's pastoral ring, Clelia had indeed promised herself that she would inform her father, as soon as she was in the carriage, of the little service which the prelate had asked of her; but after the word threats, uttered with anger, she took it for granted that her father would intercept the token; she covered the ring with her left hand and pressed it passionately. During the whole of the time that it took them to drive from the Ministry of the Interior to the citadel, she was asking herself whether it would be criminal on her part not to speak of the matter to her father. She was extremely pious, extremely timorous, and her heart, usually so tranquil, beat with an unaccustomed violence; but in the end thechi va làof the sentry posted on the rampart above the gate rang out on the approach of the carriage before Clelia had found a form of words calculated to incline her father not to refuse, so much afraid was she of his refusing. As they climbed the three hundred and sixty steps which led to the governor's residence, Clelia could think of nothing.
She hastened to speak to her uncle, who rebuked her and refused to lend himself to anything.
"Well," cried the General, when he caught sight of his brother Don Cesare, "here is the Duchessa going to spend a hundred thousand scudi to make a fool of me and help the prisoner to escape!"
But, for the moment, we are obliged to leave Fabrizio in his prison, at the very summit of the citadel of Parma; he is well guarded and we shall perhaps find him a little altered when we return to him. We must now concern ourselves first of all with the court, where certain highly complicated intrigues, and in particular the passions of an unhappy woman are going to decide his fate. As he climbed the three hundred and ninety steps to his prison in the Torre Farnese, beneath the eyes of the governor, Fabrizio, who had so greatly dreaded this moment, found that he had no time to think of his misfortunes.
On returning home after the party at Conte Zurla's, the Duchessa dismissed her women with a wave of the hand; then, letting herself fall, fully dressed, on to her bed, "Fabrizio," she cried aloud, "is in the power of his enemies, and perhaps to spite me they will give him poison!" How is one to depict the moment of despair that followed this statement of the situation in a woman so far from reasonable, so much the slave of every passing sensation, and, without admitting it to herself, desperately in love with the young prisoner? There were inarticulate cries, paroxysms of rage, convulsive movements, but never a tear. She had sent her women away to conceal her tears; she thought that she was going to break into sobs as soon as she found herself alone; but tears, those first comforters in hours of great sorrow, completely failed her. Anger, indignation, the sense of her own inferiority when matched with the Prince, had too firm a mastery of this proud soul.
"Am I not humiliated enough?" she kept on exclaiming; "I am outraged, and, worse still, Fabrizio's life is in danger; and I have no means of vengeance! Wait a moment, my Prince; you kill me, well and good, you have the power to do so; but afterwards I shall have your life. Alas! Poor Fabrizio, how will that help you? What a difference from the day when I was proposing to leave Parma, and yet even then I thought I was unhappy . . . what blindness! I was going to break with all the habits and customs of a pleasant life; alas! without knowing it, I was on the edge of an event which was to decide my fate for ever. Had not the Conte, with the miserable fawning instinct of a courtier, omitted the wordsunjust proceedingsfrom that fatal note which the Prince's vanity allowed me to secure, we should have been saved. I had had the good fortune (rather than the skill, I must admit) to bring into play his personal vanity on the subject of his beloved town of Parma. Then I threatened to leave, then I was free. . . . Great God! What sort of slave am I now? Here I am now nailed down in this foul sewer, and Fabrizio in chains in the citadel, in that citadel which for so many eminent men has been the ante-room of death; and I can no longer keep that tiger cowed by the fear of seeing me leave his den.
"He has too much sense not to realise that I will never move from the infamous tower in which my heart is enchained. Now, the injured vanity of the man may put the oddest ideas into his head; their fantastic cruelty would but whet the appetite of his astounding vanity. If he returns to his former programme of insipid love-making, if he says to me: 'Accept the devotion of your slave or Fabrizio dies,'—well, there is the old story of Judith. . . . Yes, but if it is only suicide for me, it will be murder for Fabrizio; his fool of a successor, our Crown Prince, and the infamous headsman Rassi will have Fabrizio hanged as my accomplice."
The Duchessa wailed aloud: this dilemma, from which she could see no way of escape, was torturing her unhappy heart. Her distracted head could see no other probability in the future. For ten minutes she writhed like a mad-woman; then a sleep of utter exhaustion took the place for a few moments of this horrible state, life was crushed out. A few minutes later she awoke with a start and found herself sitting on her bed; she had dreamed that, in her presence, the Prince was going to cut off Fabrizio's head. With what haggard eyes the Duchessa stared round her! When at length she was convinced that neither Fabrizio nor the Prince was in the room with her, she fell back on her bed and was on the point of fainting. Her physical exhaustion was such, that she could not summon up enough strength to change her position. "Great God! If I could die!" she said to herself. . . . "But what cowardice, for me to abandon Fabrizio in his trouble! My wits are straying. . . . Come, let us get back to the facts; let us consider calmly the execrable position in which I have plunged myself, as though of my own free will. What a lamentable piece of stupidity to come and live at the court of an Absolute Prince! A tyrant who knows all his victims; every look they give him he interprets as a defiance of his power. Alas, that is what neither the Conte nor I took into account when we left Milan: I thought of the attractions of an amusing court; something inferior, it is true, but something in the same style as the happy days of Prince Eugène.
"Looking from without, we can form no idea of what is meant by the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects by sight. The outward form of despotism is the same as that of the other kinds of government: there are judges, for instance, but they are Rassis: the monster! He would see nothing extraordinary in hanging his own father if the Prince ordered him to do so. . . . He would call it his duty. . . . Seduce Rassi! Unhappy wretch that I am! I possess no means of doing so. What can I offer him? A hundred thousand francs, possibly: and they say that, after the last dagger-blow which the wrath of heaven against this unhappy country allowed him to escape, the Prince sent him ten thousand golden sequins in a casket. Besides, what sum of money would seduce him? That soul of mud, which has never read anything but contempt in the eyes of men, enjoys here the pleasure of seeing now fear, and even respect there; he may become Minister of Police, and why not? Then three-fourths of the inhabitants of the place will be his base courtiers, and will tremble before him in as servile a fashion as he himself trembles before his sovereign.
"Since I cannot fly this detested spot, I must be of use here to Fabrizio: live alone, in solitude, in despair!—what can I do then for Fabrizio? Come;forward, unhappy woman! Do your duty; go into society, pretend to think no more of Fabrizio. . . . Pretend to forget him, the dear angel!"
So speaking, the Duchessa burst into tears; at last she could weep. After an hour set apart for human frailty, she saw with some slight consolation that her mind was beginning to grow clearer. "To have the magic carpet," she said to herself, "to snatch Fabrizio from the citadel and fly with him to some happy place where we could not be pursued, Paris for instance. We should live there, at first, on the twelve hundred francs which his father's agent transmits to me with so pleasing a regularity. I could easily gather together a hundred thousand francs from the remains of my fortune!" The Duchessa's imagination passed in review, with moments of unspeakable delight, all the details of the life which she would lead three hundred leagues from Parma. "There," she said to herself, "he could enter the service under an assumed name. . . . Placed in a regiment of those gallant Frenchmen, the young Valserra would speedily win a reputation; at last he would be happy."
These blissful pictures brought on a second flood of tears, but they were tears of joy. So happiness did exist then somewhere in the world! This state lasted for a long time; the poor woman had a horror of coming back to the contemplation of the grim reality. At length, as the light of dawn began to mark with a white line the tops of the trees in her garden, she forced herself into a state of composure. "In a few hours from now," she told herself, "I shall be on the field of battle; it will be a case for action, and if anything should occur to irritate me, if the Prince should take it into his head to say anything to me about Fabrizio, I am by no means certain that I can keep myself properly in control. I must therefore, here and now,make plans.
"If I am declared a State criminal, Rassi will seize everything there is in thispalazzo; on the first of this month the Conte and I burned, as usual, all papers of which the police might make any improper use; and he is Minister of Police! That is the amusing part of it. I have three diamonds of some value; to-morrow, Fulgenzio, my old boatman from Grianta, will set off for Geneva, where he will deposit them in a safe place. Should Fabrizio ever escape (Great God, be Thou propitious to me!" She crossed herself), "the unutterable meanness of the Marchese del Dongo will decide that it is a sin to supply food to a man pursued by a lawful Sovereign: then he will at least find my diamonds, he will have bread.
"Dismiss the Conte . . . being left alone with him, after what has happened, is the one thing I cannot face. The poor man! He is not bad really, far from it; he is only weak. That commonplace soul does not rise to the level of ours. Poor Fabrizio! Why cannot you be here for a moment with me to discuss our perils?
"The Conte's meticulous prudence would spoil all my plans, and besides, I must on no account involve him in my downfall. . . . For why should not the vanity of that tyrant cast me into prison? I shall have conspired . . . what could be easier to prove? If it should be to his citadel that he sent me, and I could manage, by bribery, to speak to Fabrizio, were it only for an instant, with what courage would we step out together to death! But enough of such follies: his Rassi would advise him to make an end of me with poison; my appearance in the streets, riding upon a cart, might touch the hearts of his dear Parmesans. . . . But what is this? Still romancing? Alas! These follies must be forgiven a poor woman whose actual lot is so piteous! The truth of all this is that the Prince will not send me to my death; but nothing could be more easy than to cast me into prison and keep me there; he will make his people hide all sorts of suspicious papers in some corner of mypalazzo, as they did with that poor L——. Then three judges—not too big rascals, for they will have what is calleddocumentary evidence—and a dozen false witnesses will be all he needs. So I may be sentenced to death as having conspired, and the Prince, in his boundless clemency, taking into consideration the fact that I have had the honour of being admitted to his court, will commute my punishment to ten years in a fortress. But I, so as not to fall short in any way of that violent character which has led the Marchesa Raversi and my other enemies to say so many stupid things about me, will poison myself bravely. So, at least, the public will be kind enough to believe; but I wager that Rassi will appear in my cell to bring me gallantly, in the Prince's name, a little bottle of strychnine, or Perugia opium.
"Yes, I must quarrel in the most open manner with the Conte, for I do not wish to involve him in my downfall—that would be a scandalous thing; the poor man has loved me with such candour! My mistake lay in thinking that a true courtier would have sufficient heart left to be capable of love. Very probably the Prince will find some excuse for casting me into prison; he will be afraid of my perverting public opinion with regard to Fabrizio. The Conte is a man of perfect honour; at once he will do what the sycophants of this court, in their profound astonishment, will call madness, he will leave the court. I braved the Prince's authority on the evening of the note; I may expect anything from his wounded vanity: does a man who is born a Prince ever forget the sensation I gave him that evening? Besides, the Conte, once he has quarrelled with me, is in a stronger position for being of use to Fabrizio. But if the Conte, whom this decision of mine must plunge in despair, should avenge himself? . . . There, now, is an idea that would never occur to him; his is not a fundamentally base nature like the Prince's; the Conte may, with a sigh of protest, countersign a wicked decree, but he is a man of honour. And besides, avenge himself for what? Simply because, after loving him for five years without giving the slightest offence of his love, I say to him: 'Dear Conte, I had the good fortune to be in love with you: very well, that flame is burning low; I no longer love you, but I know your heart through and through, I retain a profound regard for you and you will always be my best friend.'
"What answer can agalantuomomake to so sincere a declaration?
"I shall take a new lover, or so at least people will suppose; I shall say to this lover: 'After all, the Prince does right to punish Fabrizio's folly; but on the day of hisfesta, no doubt our gracious Sovereign will set him at liberty.' Thus I gain six months. The new lover whom prudence suggests to me would be that venal judge, that foul hangman of a Rassi. . . . He would find himself ennobled and, as far as that goes, I shall give him the right of entry into good society. Forgive me, dear Fabrizio; such an effort, for me, is beyond the bounds of possibility. What! That monster, still all bespattered with the blood of Conte P—— and of D——! I should faint with horror whenever he came near me, or rather I should seize a knife and plunge it into his vile heart. Do not ask of me things that are impossible!
"Yes, that is the first thing to do: forget Fabrizio! And not the least trace of anger with the Prince; I must resume my ordinary gaiety, which will seem all the more attractive to these souls of mud, in the first place because I shall appear to be submitting with good grace to their Sovereign's will, secondly because, so far from laughing at them, I shall take good care to bring out all their pretty little qualities; for instance, I shall compliment Conte Zurla on the beauty of the white feather in his hat, which he has just had sent him from Lyons by courier, and which keeps him perfectly happy.
"Choose a lover from the Raversi's party. . . . If the Conte goes, that will be the party in office; there is where the power will lie. It will be a friend of the Raversi that will reign over the citadel, for Fabio Conti will take office as Minister. How in the world will the Prince, a man used to good society, a man of intelligence, accustomed to the charming collaboration of the Conte, be able to discuss business with that ox, that king of fools, whose whole life has been occupied with the fundamental problem: ought His Highness's troops to have seven buttons on their uniform, in front, or nine? It is all those brute beasts thoroughly jealous of myself, and that is where you are in danger, dear Fabrizio, it is those brute beasts who are going to decide my fate and yours! Well then, shall I not allow the Conte to hand in his resignation? Let him remain, even if he has to submit to humiliations. He always imagines that to resign is the greatest sacrifice a Prime Minister can make; and whenever his mirror tells him he is growing old, he offers me that sacrifice: a complete rupture, then; yes, and reconciliation only in the event of its being the sole method of prevailing upon him not to go. Naturally, I shall give him his dismissal in the friendliest possible way; but, after his courtierlike omission of the wordsunjust proceedingsin the Prince's note, I feel that, if I am not to hate him, I need to spend some months without seeing him. On that decisive evening, I had no need of his cleverness; he had only to write down what I dictated to him, he had only to write those wordswhich I had obtainedby my own strength of character: he was led away by force of habit as a base courtier. He told me next day that he could not make the Prince sign an absurdity, that we should have hadletters of grace; why, good God, with people like that, with those monsters of vanity and rancour who bear the name Farnese, one takes what one can get."
At the thought of this, all the Duchessa's anger was rekindled. "The Prince has betrayed me," she said to herself, "and in how dastardly a way! There is no excuse for the man: he has brains, discernment, he is capable of reasoning; there is nothing base in him but his passions. The Conte and I have noticed it a score of times; his mind becomes vulgar only when he imagines that some one has tried to insult him. Well, Fabrizio's crime has nothing to do with politics, it is a trifling homicide, just like a hundred others that are reported every day in his happy States, and the Conte has sworn to me that he has taken pains to procure the most accurate information, and that Fabrizio is innocent. That Giletti was certainly not lacking in courage: finding himself within a few yards of the frontier, he suddenly felt the temptation to rid himself of an attractive rival."
The Duchessa paused for a long time to consider whether it were possible to believe in Fabrizio's guilt, not that she felt that it would have been a very grave sin in a gentleman of her nephew's rank to rid himself of the impertinence of a mummer; but, in her despair, she was beginning to feel vaguely that she would be obliged to fight to prove Fabrizio's innocence. "No," she told herself finally, "here is a decisive proof: he is like poor Pietranera, he always has all his pockets stuffed with weapons, and that day he was carrying only a wretched singled-barrelled gun, and even that he had borrowed from one of the workmen.
"I hate the Prince because he has betrayed me, and betrayed me in the most dastardly fashion; after his written pardon, he had the poor boy seized at Bologna, and all that. But I shall settle that account." About five o'clock in the morning, the Duchessa, crushed by this prolonged fit of despair, rang for her women; who screamed. Seeing her on her bed, fully dressed, with her diamonds, pale as the sheet on which she lay and with closed eyes, it seemed to them as though they beheld her laid out in state after death. They would have supposed that she had completely lost consciousness had they not remembered that she had just rung for them. A few rare tears trickled from time to time down her insentient cheeks; her women gathered from a sign which she made that she wished to be put to bed.
Twice that evening after the party at the Minister Zurla's, the Conte had called on the Duchessa; being refused admittance, he wrote to her that he wished to ask her advice as to his conduct. Ought he to retain his post after the insult that they had dared to offer him? The Conte went on to say: "The young man is innocent; but, were he guilty, ought they to arrest him without first informing me, his acknowledged protector?" The Duchessa did not see this letter until the following day.
The Conte had no virtue; one may indeed add that what the Liberals understand byvirtue(seeking the greatest happiness of the greatest number) seemed to him silly; he believed himself bound to seek first and foremost the happiness of Conte Mosca della Rovere; but he was entirely honourable, and perfectly sincere when he spoke of his resignation. Never in his life had he told the Duchessa a lie; she, as it happened, did not pay the slightest attention to this letter; her attitude, and a very painful attitude it was, had been adopted:to pretend to forget Fabrizio; after that effort, nothing else mattered to her.
Next day, about noon, the Conte, who had called ten times at thepalazzoSanseverina, was at length admitted; he was appalled when he saw the Duchessa. . . . "She looks forty!" he said to himself; "and yesterday she was so brilliant, so young! . . . Everyone tells me that, during her long conversation with Clelia Conti, she looked every bit as young and far more attractive."
The Duchessa's voice, her tone were as strange as her personal appearance. This tone, divested of all passion, of all human interest, of all anger, turned the Conte pale; it reminded him of the manner of a friend of his who, a few months earlier, when on the point of death, and after receiving the Last Sacrament, had sent for him to talk to him.
After some minutes the Duchessa was able to speak to him. She looked at him, and her eyes remained dead.
"Let us part, my dear Conte," she said to him in a faint but quite articulate voice which she tried to make sound friendly; "let us part, we must! Heaven is my witness that, for five years, my behaviour towards you has been irreproachable. You have given me a brilliant existence, in place of the boredom which would have been my sad portion at the castle of Grianta; without you I should have reached old age several years sooner. . . . For my part, my sole occupation has been to try to make you find happiness. It is because I love you that I propose to you this partingà l'amiable, as they say in France."
The Conte did not understand; she was obliged to repeat her statement several times. He grew deadly pale, and, flinging himself on his knees by her bedside, said to her all the things that profound astonishment, followed by the keenest despair, can inspire in a man who is passionately in love. At every moment he offered to hand in his resignation and to follow his mistress to some retreat a thousand leagues from Parma.
"You dare to speak to me of departure, and Fabrizio is here!" she at length exclaimed, half rising. But seeing that the sound of Fabrizio's name made a painful impression, she added after a moment's quiet, gently pressing the Conte's hand: "No, dear friend, I am not going to tell you that I have loved you with that passion and those transports which one no longer feels, it seems to me, after thirty, and I am already a long way past that age. They will have told you that I was in love with Fabrizio, for I know that the rumour has gone round in thiswickedcourt." (Her eyes sparkled for the first time in this conversation, as she uttered the wordwicked.) "I swear to you before God, and upon Fabrizio's life, that never has there passed between him and me the tiniest thing which could not have borne the eyes of a third person. Nor shall I say to you that I love him exactly as a sister might; I love him instinctively, so to speak. I love in him his courage, so simple and so perfect that, one may say, he is not aware of it himself; I remember that this sort of admiration began on his return from Waterloo. He was still a boy then, for all his seventeen years; his great anxiety was to know whether he had really been present at the battle, and, if so, whether he could say that he had fought, when he had not marched to the attack of any enemy battery or column. It was during the serious discussions which we used to have together on this important subject that I began to see in him a perfect charm. His great soul revealed itself to me; what sophisticated falsehoods would a well-bred young man, in his place, have flaunted! Well then, if he is not happy I cannot be happy. There, that is a statement which well describes the state of my heart; if it is not the truth it is at any rate all of it that I see." The Conte, encouraged by this tone of frankness and intimacy, tried to kiss her hand; she drew it back with a sort of horror. "The time is past," she said to him; "I am a woman of thirty-seven, I find myself on the threshold of old age, I already feel all its discouragements, and perhaps I have even drawn near to the tomb. That is a terrible moment, by all one hears, and yet it seems to me that I desire it. I feel the worst symptom of old age; my heart is extinguished by this frightful misfortune, I can no longer love. I see in you now, dear Conte, only the shade of someone who was dear to me. I shall say more, it is gratitude, simply and solely, that makes me speak to you thus."
"What is to become of me," the Conte repeated, "of me who feel that I am attached to you more passionately than in the first days of our friendship, when I saw you at the Scala?"
"Let me confess to you one thing, dear friend, this talk of love bores me, and seems to me indecent. Come," she said, trying to smile, but in vain, "courage! Be the man of spirit, the judicious man, the man of resource in all circumstances. Be with me what you really are in the eyes of strangers, the most able man and the greatest politician that Italy has produced for ages."
The Conte rose, and paced the room in silence for some moments.
"Impossible, dear friend," he said to her at length; "I am rent asunder by the most violent passion, and you ask me to consult my reason. There is no longer any reason for me!"
"Let us not speak of passion, I beg of you," she said in a dry tone; and this was the first time, after two hours of talk, that her voice assumed any expression whatever. The Conte, in despair himself, sought to console her.
"He has betrayed me," she cried without in any way considering the reasons for hope which the Conte was setting before her; "hehas betrayed me in the most dastardly fashion!" Her deadly pallor ceased for a moment; but, even in this moment of violent excitement, the Conte noticed that she had not the strength to raise her arms.
"Great God! Can it be possible," he thought, "that she is only ill? In that case, though, it would be the beginning of some very serious illness." Then, filled with uneasiness, he proposed to call in the famous Razori, the leading physician in the place and in the whole of Italy.
"So you wish to give a stranger the pleasure of learning the whole extent of my despair? . . . Is that the counsel of a traitor or of a friend?" And she looked at him with strange eyes.
"It is all over," he said to himself with despair, "she has no longer any love for me! And worse still; she no longer includes me even among the common men of honour.
"I may tell you," the Conte went on, speaking with emphasis, "that I have been anxious above all things to obtain details of the arrest which has thrown us into despair, and the curious thing is that still I know nothing positive; I have had the constables at the nearest station questioned, they saw the prisoner arrive by the Castelnuovo road and received orders to follow hissediola. I at once sent off Bruno, whose zeal is as well known to you as his devotion; he has orders to go on from station to station until he finds out where and how Fabrizio was arrested."
On hearing him utter Fabrizio's name, the Duchessa was seized by a slight convulsion.
"Forgive me, my friend," she said to the Conte as soon as she was able to speak; "these details interest me greatly, give me them all, let me have a clear understanding of the smallest circumstances."
"Well, Signora," the Conte went on, assuming a somewhat lighter air in the hope of distracting her a little, "I have a good mind to send a confidential messenger to Bruno and to order him to push on as far as Bologna; it was from there, perhaps, that our young friend was carried off. What is the date of his last letter?"
"Tuesday, five days ago."
"Had it been opened in the post?"
"No trace of any opening. I ought to tell you that it was written on horrible paper; the address is in a woman's hand, and that address bears the name of an old laundress who is related to my maid. The laundress believes that it is something to do with a love affair, and Cocchina refunds her for the carriage of the letters without adding anything further." The Conte, who had adopted quite the tone of a man of business, tried to discover, by questioning the Duchessa, which could have been the day of the abduction from Bologna. He only then perceived, he who had ordinarily so much tact, that this was the right tone to adopt. These details interested the unhappy woman and seemed to distract her a little. If the Conte had not been in love, this simple idea would have occurred to him as soon as he entered the room. The Duchessa sent him away in order that he might without delay dispatch fresh orders to the faithful Bruno. As they were momentarily considering the question whether there had been a sentence passed before the moment at which the Prince signed the note addressed to the Duchessa, the latter with a certain determination seized the opportunity to say to the Conte: "I shall not reproach you in the least for having omitted the wordsunjust proceedingsin the letter which you wrote and he signed, it was the courtier's instinct that gripped you by the throat; unconsciously you preferred your master's interest to your friend's. You have placed your actions under my orders, dear Conte, and that for a long time past, but it is not in your power to change your nature; you have great talents for the part of Minister, but you have also the instinct of that trade. The suppression of the wordunjustwas my ruin; but far be it from me to reproach you for it in any way, it was the fault of your instinct and not of your will.
"Bear in mind," she went on, changing her tone, and with the most imperious air, "that I am by no means unduly afflicted by the abduction of Fabrizio, that I have never had the slightest intention of removing myself from this place, that I am full of respect for the Prince. That is what you have to say, and this is what I, for my part, wish to say to you: 'As I intend to have the entire control of my own behaviour for the future, I wish to part from youà l'amiable, that is to say as a good and old friend. Consider that I am sixty, the young woman is dead in me, I can no longer form an exaggerated idea of anything in the world, I can no longer love.' But I should be even more wretched than I am were I to compromise your future. It may enter into my plans to give myself the appearance of having a young lover, and I should not like to see you distressed. I can swear to you by Fabrizio's happiness"—she stopped for half a minute after these words—"that never have I been guilty of any infidelity to you, and that in five whole years. It is a long time," she said; she tried to smile; her pallid cheeks were convulsed, but her lips were unable to part. "I swear to you even that I have never either planned or wished such a thing. Now you understand that, leave me."
The Conte in despair left thepalazzoSanseverina: he could see in the Duchessa the deliberately formed intention to part from him, and never had he been so desperately in love. This is one of the points to which I am obliged frequently to revert, because they are improbable outside Italy. Returning home, he dispatched as many as six different people along the road to Castelnuovo and Bologna, and gave them letters. "But that is not all," the unhappy Conte told himself: "the Prince may take it into his head to have this wretched boy executed, and that in revenge for the tone which the Duchessa adopted with him on the day of that fatal note. I felt that the Duchessa was exceeding a limit beyond which one ought never to go, and it was to compensate for this that I was so incredibly foolish as to suppress the wordsunjust proceedings, the only ones that bound the Sovereign. . . . But bah! Are those people bound by anything in the world? That is no doubt the greatest mistake of my life, I have risked everything that can bring me life's reward: it now remains to compensate for my folly by dint of activity and cunning; but after all, if I can obtain nothing, even by sacrificing a little of my dignity, I leave the man stranded; with his dreams of high politics, with his ideas of making himself Constitutional King of Lombardy, we shall see how he will fill my place. . . . Fabio Conti is nothing but a fool, Rassi's talent reduces itself to having a man legally hanged who is displeasing to Authority."
As soon as he had definitely made up his mind to resign from the Ministry if the rigour shewn Fabrizio went beyond that of simple detention, the Conte said to himself: "If a caprice of that man's vanity, rashly braved, should cost me my happiness, at least I shall have my honour left. . . . By that token, since I am throwing my portfolio to the winds, I may allow myself a hundred actions which, only this morning, would have seemed to be outside the bounds of possibility. For instance, I am going to attempt everything that is humanly feasible to secure Fabrizio's escape. . . . Great God!" exclaimed the Conte, breaking off in his soliloquy and opening his eyes wide as though at the sight of an unexpected happiness, "the Duchessa never said anything to me about an escape; can she have been wanting in sincerity for once in her life, and is the motive of her quarrel only a desire that I should betray the Prince? Upon my word, no sooner said than done!"
The Conte's eye had recovered all its satirical sublety. "That engaging Fiscal Rassi is paid by his master for all the sentences that disgrace us throughout Europe, but he is not the sort of man to refuse to be paid by me to betray the master's secrets. The animal has a mistress and a confessor, but the mistress is of too vile a sort for me to be able to tackle her, next day she would relate our interview to all the applewomen in the parish." The Conte, revived by this gleam of hope, was by this time on his way to the Cathedral; astonished at the alertness of his gait, he smiled in spite of his grief: "This is what it is," he said, "to be no longer a Minister!" This Cathedral, like many churches in Italy, serves as a passage from one street to another; the Conte saw as he entered one of the Archbishop's Grand Vicars crossing the nave.
"Since I have met you here," he said to him, "will you be so very good as to spare my gout the deadly fatigue of climbing to His Grace the Archbishop's. He would be doing me the greatest favour in the world if he would be so kind as to come down to the sacristy." The Archbishop was delighted by this message, he had a thousand things to say to the Minister on the subject of Fabrizio. But the Minister guessed that these things were no more than fine phrases, and refused to listen to any of them.
"What sort of man is Dugnani, the Vicar of San Paolo?"
"A small mind and a great ambition," replied the Archbishop; "few scruples and extreme poverty, for we too have our vices!"
"Egad, Monsignore," exclaimed the Minister, "you portray like Tacitus"; and he took leave of him, laughing. No sooner had he returned to his Ministry than he sent for Priore Dugnani.
"You direct the conscience of my excellent friend the Fiscal General Rassi; are you sure he has nothing to tell me?" And, without any further speech or ceremony, he dismissed Dugnani.
The Conte regarded himself as out of office. "Let us see now," he said to himself, "how many horses we shall be able to have after my disgrace, for that is what they will call my resignation." He made a reckoning of his fortune: he had come to the Ministry with 80,000 francs to his name; greatly to his surprise, he found that, all told, his fortune at that moment did not amount to 500,000 francs: "that is an income of 20,000 lire at the most," he said to himself. "I must admit that I am a great simpleton! There is not a citizen in Parma who does not suppose me to have an income of 150,000 lire, and the Prince, in that respect, is more of a cit than any of them. When they see me in the ditch, they will say that I know how to hide my fortune. Egad!" he cried, "if I am still Minister in three months' time, we shall see that fortune doubled." He found in this idea an occasion for writing to the Duchessa, which he seized with avidity, but to bespeak her pardon for a letter, seeing the terms on which they were, he filled this with figures and calculations. "We shall have only 20,000 lire of income," he told her, "to live upon, all three of us, at Naples, Fabrizio, you and myself. Fabrizio and I shall have one saddle-horse between us." The Minister had barely sent off his letter when the Fiscal General Rassi was announced. He received him with a stiffness which bordered on impertinence.
"What, Sir," he said to him, "you seize and carry off from Bologna a conspirator who is under my protection; what is more, you propose to cut off his head, and you say nothing about it to me! Do you at least know the name of my successor? Is it General Conti, or yourself?"
Rassi was dumbfoundered; he was too little accustomed to good society to know whether the Conte was speaking seriously: he blushed a deep red, mumbled a few scarcely intelligible words; the Conte watched him and enjoyed his embarrassment. Suddenly Rassi pulled himself together and exclaimed, with perfect ease and with the air of Figaro caught red-handed by Almaviva:
"Faith, Signor Conte, I shan't beat about the bush with Your Excellency: what will you give me to answer all your questions as I should those of my confessor?"
"The Cross of San Paolo" (which is the Parmesan Order) "or money, if you can find me an excuse for granting it to you."
"I prefer the Cross of San Paolo, because it ennobles me."
"What, my dear Fiscal, you still pay some regard to our poor nobility?"
"If I were of noble birth," replied Rassi with all the impudence of his trade, "the families of the people I have had hanged would hate me, but they would not feel contempt for me."
"Very well, I will save you from their contempt," said the Conte; "cure me of my ignorance. What do you intend to do with Fabrizio?"
"Faith, the Prince is greatly embarrassed; he is afraid that, seduced by the fine eyes of Armida—forgive my slightly bold language, they are the Sovereign's own words—he is afraid that, seduced by a certain pair of very fine eyes, which have touched him slightly himself, you may leave him stranded, and there is no one but you to handle the question of Lombardy. I will go so far as to say," Rassi went on, lowering his voice, "that there is a fine opportunity there for you, and one that is well worth the Cross of San Paolo which you are giving me. The Prince would grant you, as a reward from the nation, a fine estate worth 600,000 francs, which he would set apart from his own domains, or a gratuity of 300,000 scudi, if you would agree not to interfere in the affairs of Fabrizio del Dongo, or at any rate not to speak of them to him except in public."
"I expected something better than that," said the Conte; "not to interfere with Fabrizio means quarrelling with the Duchessa."
"There, that is just what the Prince says: the fact is that he is horribly enraged against the Signora Duchessa, this is between ourselves; and he is afraid that, to compensate yourself for the rupture with that charming lady, now that you are a widower, you may ask him for the hand of his cousin, the old Princess Isotta, who is only fifty."
"He has guessed aright," exclaimed the Conte; "our master is the shrewdest man in his States."
Never had the Conte entertained the grotesque idea of marrying this elderly Princess; nothing would less have suited a man whom the ceremonies of the court bored to death.
He began to tap with his snuff-box on the marble of a little table beside his chair. Rassi saw in this gesture of embarrassment the possibility of a fine windfall; his eye gleamed.
"As a favour, Signor Conte," he cried, "if Your Excellency decides to accept this estate of 600,000 francs or the gratuity in money, I beg that he will not choose any other intermediary than myself. I should make an effort," he added, lowering his voice, "to have the gratuity increased, or else to have a forest of some importance added to the land. If Your Excellency would deign to introduce a little gentleness and tact into his manner in speaking to the Prince of this youngster they've locked up, a Duchy might perhaps be created out of the lands which the nation's gratitude would offer him. I repeat to Your Excellency; the Prince, for the moment, abominates the Duchessa, but he is greatly embarrassed, so much so indeed that I have sometimes thought there must be some secret consideration which he dared not confess to me. Do you know, we may find a gold mine here, I selling you his most intimate secrets, and quite openly, for I am supposed to be your sworn enemy. After all, if he is furious with the Duchessa, he believes also, and so do we all, that you are the one man in the world who can carry through all the secret negotiations with regard to the Milanese. Will Your Excellency permit me to repeat to him textually the Sovereign's words?" said Rassi, growing heated; "there is often a character in the order of the words which no translation can render, and you may be able to see more in them than I see."
"I permit everything," said the Conte, as he went on, with an air of distraction, tapping the marble table with his gold snuff-box; "I permit everything, and I shall be grateful."
"Give me a patent of hereditary nobility independently of the Cross, and I shall be more than satisfied. When I speak of ennoblement to the Prince, he answers: 'A scoundrel like you, noble! I should have to shut up shop next day; nobody in Parma would wish to be ennobled again.' To come back to the business of the Milanese, the Prince said to me not three days ago: 'There is only that rascal to unravel the thread of our intrigues; if I send him away, or if he follows the Duchessa, I may as well abandon the hope of seeing myself one day the Liberal and beloved ruler of all Italy.'"
At this the Conte drew breath. "Fabrizio will not die," he said to himself.
Never in his life had Rassi been able to secure an intimate conversation with the Prime Minister. He was beside himself with joy: he saw himself on the eve of being able to discard the name Rassi, which had become synonymous throughout the country with everything that was base and vile. The lower orders gave the name Rassi to mad dogs; recently more than one soldier had fought a duel because one of his comrades had called him Rassi. Not a week passed, moreover, in which this ill-starred name did not figure in some atrocious sonnet. His son, a young and innocent schoolboy of sixteen, used to be driven out of the caffè on the strength of his name. It was the burning memory of all these little perquisites of his office that made him commit an imprudence. "I have an estate," he said to the Conte, drawing his chair closer to the Minister's; "it is called Riva. I should like to be Barone Riva."
"Why not?" said the Minister. Rassi was beside himself.
"Very well, Signor Conte, I shall take the liberty of being indiscreet. I shall venture to guess the object of your desires; you aspire to the hand of the Princess Isotta, and it is a noble ambition. Once you are of the family, you are sheltered from disgrace, you have our mantied down. I shall not conceal from you that he has a horror of this marriage with the Princess Isotta. But if your affairs were entrusted to some skilful andwell paidperson, you would be in a position not to despair of success."
"I, my dear Barone, should despair of it; I disavow in advance everything that you can say in my name; but on the day on which that illustrious alliance comes at length to crown my wishes and to give me so exalted a position in the State, I will offer you, myself, 300,000 francs of my own money, or else recommend the Prince to accord you a mark of his favour which you yourself will prefer to that sum of money."
The reader finds this conversation long: and yet we are sparing him more than half of it; it continued for two hours more. Rassi left the Conte's presence mad with joy; the Conte was left with a great hope of saving Fabrizio, and more than ever determined to hand in his resignation. He found that his credit stood in need of renewal by the succession to power of persons such as Rassi and General Conti; he took an exquisite delight in a possible method which he had just discovered of avenging himself on the Prince: "He may send the Duchessa away," he cried, "but, by gad, he will have to abandon the hope of becoming Constitutional King of Lombardy." (This was an absurd fantasy: the Prince had abundance of brains, but, by dint of dreaming of it, he had fallen madly in love with the idea.)
The Conte could not contain himself for joy as he hurried to the Duchessa's to give her a report of his conversation with the Fiscal. He found the door closed to him; the porter scarcely dared admit to him the fact of this order, received from his mistress's own lips. The Conte went sadly back to the ministerialpalazzo; the rebuff he had just encountered completely eclipsed the joy that his conversation with the Prince's confidant had given him. Having no longer the heart to devote himself to anything, the Conte was wandering gloomily through his picture gallery when, a quarter of an hour later, he received a note which ran as follows:
"Since it is true, dear and good friend, that we are nothing more now than friends, you must come to see me only three times in the week. In a fortnight we shall reduce these visits, always so dear to my heart, to two monthly. If you wish to please me, give publicity to this apparent rupture; if you wished to pay me back almost all the love that I once felt for you, you would choose a new mistress for yourself. As for myself, I have great plans of dissipation: I intend to go a great deal into society, perhaps I shall even find a man of parts to make me forget my misfortunes. Of course, in your capacity as a friend, the first place in my heart will always be kept for you; but I do not wish, for the future, that my actions should be said to have been dictated by your wisdom; above all, I wish it to be well known that I have lost all my influence over your decisions. In a word, dear Conte, be assured that you will always be my dearest friend, but never anything else. Do not, I beg you, entertain any idea of a resumption, it is all over. Count, always, upon my friendship."
"Since it is true, dear and good friend, that we are nothing more now than friends, you must come to see me only three times in the week. In a fortnight we shall reduce these visits, always so dear to my heart, to two monthly. If you wish to please me, give publicity to this apparent rupture; if you wished to pay me back almost all the love that I once felt for you, you would choose a new mistress for yourself. As for myself, I have great plans of dissipation: I intend to go a great deal into society, perhaps I shall even find a man of parts to make me forget my misfortunes. Of course, in your capacity as a friend, the first place in my heart will always be kept for you; but I do not wish, for the future, that my actions should be said to have been dictated by your wisdom; above all, I wish it to be well known that I have lost all my influence over your decisions. In a word, dear Conte, be assured that you will always be my dearest friend, but never anything else. Do not, I beg you, entertain any idea of a resumption, it is all over. Count, always, upon my friendship."
This last stroke was too much for the Conte's courage: he wrote a fine letter to the Prince resigning all his offices, and addressed it to the Duchessa with a request that she would forward it to the Palace. A moment later, he received his resignation, torn across, and on one of the blank scraps of the paper the Duchessa had condescended to write: "No, a thousand times no!"
It would be difficult to describe the despair of the poor Minister. "She is right, I quite agree," he kept saying to himself at every moment; "my omission of the wordsunjust proceedingsis a dreadful misfortune; it will involve perhaps the death of Fabrizio, and that will lead to my own." It was with death in his heart that the Conte, who did not wish to appear at the Sovereign's Palace before being summoned there, wrote out with his own hand themotu propriowhich created Rassi Cavaliere of the Order of San Paolo and conferred on him hereditary nobility; the Conte appended to it a report of half a page which set forth to the Prince the reasons of state which made this measure advisable. He found a sort of melancholy joy in making a fair copy of each of these documents, which he addressed to the Duchessa.
He lost himself in suppositions; he tried to guess what, for the future, would be the plan of conduct of the woman he loved. "She has no idea herself," he said to himself; "one thing alone remains certain, which is that she would not for anything in the world fail to adhere to any resolution once she had announced it to me." What added still further to his unhappiness was that he could not succeed in finding that the Duchessa was to be blamed. "She has shewn me a favour in loving me; she ceases to love me after a mistake, unintentional, it is true, but one that may involve a horrible consequence; I have no right to complain." Next morning, the Conte learned that the Duchessa had begun to go into society again; she had appeared the evening before in all the houses in which parties were being given. What would have happened if they had met in the same drawing-room? How was he to speak to her? In what tone was he to address her? And how could he not speak to her?
The day that followed was a day of gloom; the rumour had gone abroad everywhere that Fabrizio was going to be put to death, the town was stirred. It was added that the Prince, having regard for his high birth, had deigned to decide that he should have his head cut off.
"It is I that am killing him," the Conte said to himself; "I can no longer aspire to see the Duchessa ever again." In spite of this fairly obvious conclusion, he could not restrain himself from going three times to her door; as a matter of fact, in order not to be noticed, he went to her house on foot. In his despair, he had even the courage to write to her. He had sent for Rassi twice; the Fiscal had not shewn his face. "The scoundrel is playing me false," the Conte said to himself.
The day after this, three great pieces of news excited the high society of Parma, and even the middle classes. The execution of Fabrizio was more certain than ever; and, a highly strange complement to this news, the Duchessa did not appear to be at all despairing. To all appearance, she bestowed only a quite moderate regret on her young lover; in any event, she made the most, with an unbounded art, of the pallor which was the legacy of a really serious indisposition, which had come to her at the time of Fabrizio's arrest. The middle classes saw clearly in these details the hard heart of a great lady of the court. In decency, however, and as a sacrifice to the shade of the young Fabrizio, she had broken with Conte Mosca. "What immorality!" exclaimed the Jansenists of Parma. But already the Duchessa, and this was incredible, seemed disposed to listen to the flatteries of the handsomest young men at court. It was observed, among other curious incidents, that she had been very gay in a conversation with Conte Baldi, the Raversi's reigning lover, and had teased him greatly over his frequent visits to thecastelloof Velleja. The lower middle class and the populace were indignant at the death of Fabrizio, which these good folk put down to the jealousy of Conte Mosca. The society of the court was also greatly taken up with the Conte, but only to laugh at him. The third of the great pieces of news to which we have referred was indeed nothing else than the Conte's resignation; everyone laughed at a ridiculous lover who, at the age of fifty-six, was sacrificing a magnificent position to his grief at being abandoned by a heartless woman, who moreover had long ago shewn her preference for a young man. The Archbishop alone had the intelligence or rather the heart to divine that honour forbade the Conte to remain Prime Minister in a country where they were going to cut off the head, and without consulting him, of a young man who was under his protection. The news of the Conte's resignation had the effect of curing General Fabio Conti of his gout, as we shall relate in due course, when we come to speak of the way in which poor Fabrizio was spending his time in the citadel, while the whole town was inquiring the hour of his execution.
On the following day the Conte saw Bruno, that faithful agent whom he had dispatched to Bologna: the Conte's heart melted at the moment when this man entered his cabinet; the sight of him recalled the happy state in which he had been when he sent him to Bologna, almost in concert with the Duchessa. Bruno came from Bologna where he had discovered nothing; he had not been able to find Lodovico, whom thepodestàof Castelnuovo had kept locked up in his village prison.
"I am going to send you to Bologna," said the Conte to Bruno; "the Duchessa wishes to give herself the melancholy pleasure of knowing the details of Fabrizio's disaster. Report yourself to thebrigadiereof police in charge of the station at Castelnuovo. . . .
"No!" exclaimed the Conte, breaking off in his orders; "start at once for Lombardy, and distribute money lavishly among all our correspondents. My object is to obtain from all these people reports of the most encouraging nature." Bruno, after clearly grasping the object of his mission, set to work to write his letters of credit. As the Conte was giving him his final instructions, he received a letter which was entirely false, but extremely well written; one would have called it the letter of a friend writing to a friend to ask a favour of him. The friend who wrote it was none other than the Prince. Having heard mention of some idea of resignation, he besought his friend, Conte Mosca, to retain his office; he asked him this in the name of their friendship and of thedangers that threatened the country, and ordered him as his master. He added that, the King of —— having placed at his disposal two Cordons of his Order, he was keeping one for himself and was sending the other to his dear Conte Mosca.
"That animal is ruining me!" cried the Conte in a fury, before the astonished Bruno, "and he thinks to win me over by those same hypocritical phrases which we have planned together so many times to lime the twig for some fool." He declined the Order that was offered him, and in his reply spoke of the state of his health as allowing him but little hope of being able to carry on for much longer the arduous duties of the Ministry. The Conte was furious. A moment later was announced the Fiscal Rassi, whom he treated like a black.
"Well! Because I have made you noble, you are beginning to shew insolence! Why did you not come yesterday to thank me, as was your bounden duty, Master Drudge?"
Rassi was a long way below the reach of insult; it was in this tone that he was daily received by the Prince; but he was anxious to be a Barone, and justified himself with spirit. Nothing was easier.
"The Prince kept me glued to a table all day yesterday; I could not leave the Palace. His Highness made me copy out in my wretched attorney's script a number of diplomatic papers so stupid and so long-winded that I really believe his sole object was to keep me prisoner. When I was finally able to take my leave of him, about five o'clock, half dead with hunger, he gave me the order to go straight home and not to go out in the evening. As a matter of fact, I saw two of his private spies, well known to me, patrolling my street until nearly midnight. This morning, as soon as I could, I sent for a carriage which took me to the door of the Cathedral. I got down from the carriage very slowly, then at a quick pace walked through the church, and here I am. Your Excellency is at this moment the one man in the world whom I am most passionately anxious to please."
"And I, Master Joker, am not in the least taken in by all these more or less well constructed stories. You refused to speak to me about Fabrizio the day before yesterday; I respected your scruples and your oaths of secrecy, although oaths, to a creature like you, are at the most means of evasion. To-day, I require the truth. What are these ridiculous rumours which make out that this young man is sentenced to death as the murderer of the comedian Giletti?"
"No one can give Your Excellency a better account of those rumours, for it was I myself who started them by the Sovereign's orders; and, I believe, it was perhaps to prevent me from informing you of this incident that he kept me prisoner all day yesterday. The Prince, who does not take me for a fool, could have no doubt that I should come to you with my Cross and ask you to fasten it in my buttonhole."
"To the point!" cried the Minister. "And no fine speeches."
"No doubt, the Prince would be glad to pass sentence of death on Signor del Dongo, but he has been sentenced, as you probably know, only to twenty years in irons, commuted by the Prince, on the very day after the sentence, to twelve years in a fortress, with fasting on bread and water every Friday and other religious observances."
"It is because I knew of this sentence to imprisonment only that I was alarmed by the rumours of immediate execution which are going about the town; I remember the death of Conte Palanza, which was such a clever trick on your part."
"It was then that I ought to have had the Cross!" cried Rassi, in no way disconcerted; "I ought to have forced him when I held him in my hand, and the man wished the prisoner killed. I was a fool then; and it is armed with that experience that I venture to advise you not to copy my example to-day." (This comparison seemed in the worst of taste to his hearer, who was obliged to restrain himself forcibly from kicking Rassi.)
"In the first place," the latter went on with the logic of a trained lawyer and the perfect assurance of a man whom no insult could offend, "in the first place there can be no question of the execution of the said del Dongo; the Prince would not dare, the times have altogether changed! Besides, I, who am noble and hope through you to become Barone, would not lend a hand in the matter. Now it is only from me, as Your Excellency knows, that the executioner of supreme penalties can receive orders, and, I swear to you, Cavaliere Rassi will never issue any such orders against Signor del Dongo."
"And you will be acting wisely," said the Conte with a severe air, taking his adversary's measure.
"Let us make a distinction," went on Rassi, smiling. "I myself figure only in the official death-roll, and if Signor del Dongo happens to die of a colic, do not go and put it down to me. The Prince is vexed, and I do not know why, with the Sanseverina." (Three days earlier Rassi would have said "the Duchessa," but, like everyone in the town, he knew of her breach with the Prime Minister.) The Conte was struck by the omission of her title on such lips, and the reader may judge of the pleasure that it afforded him; he darted at Rassi a glance charged with the keenest hatred. "My dear angel," he then said to himself, "I can shew you my love only by blind obedience to your orders.
"I must admit," he said to the Fiscal, "that I do not take any very passionate interest in the various caprices of the Signora Duchessa; only, since it was she who introduced to me this scapegrace of a Fabrizio, who would have done well to remain at Naples and not come here to complicate our affairs, I make a point of his not being put to death in my time, and I am quite ready to give you my word that you shall be Barone in the week following his release from prison."
"In that case, Signor Conte, I shall not be Barone for twelve whole years, for the Prince is furious, and his hatred of the Duchessa is so keen that he is trying to conceal it."
"His Highness is too good; what need has he to conceal his hatred, since his Prime Minister is no longer protecting the Duchessa? Only I do not wish that anyone should be able to accuse me of meanness, nor above all of jealousy: it was I who made the Duchessa come to this country, and if Fabrizio dies in prison you will not be Barone, but you will perhaps be stabbed with a dagger. But let us not talk about this trifle: the fact is that I have made an estimate of my fortune, at the most I may be able to put together an income of twenty thousand lire, on which I propose to offer my resignation, most humbly, to the Sovereign. I have some hope of finding employment with the King of Naples; that big town will offer me certain distractions which I need at this moment and which I cannot find in a hole like Parma; I should stay here only in the event of your obtaining for me the hand of the Princess Isotta," and so forth. The conversation on this subject was endless. As Rassi was rising to leave, the Conte said to him with an air of complete indifference:
"You know that people have said that Fabrizio was playing me false, in the sense that he was one of the Duchessa's lovers; I decline to accept that rumour, and, to give it the lie, I wish you to have this purse conveyed to Fabrizio."
"But, Signor Conte," said Rassi in alarm, looking at the purse, "there is an enormous sum here, and the regulations. . . ."
"To you, my dear Sir, it may be enormous," replied the Conte with an air of the most supreme contempt: "a cit like you, sending money to his friend in prison, thinks he is ruining himself if he gives him ten sequins; I, on the other hand, wish Fabrizio to receive these six thousand francs, and on no account is the Castle to know anything of the matter."
While the terrified Rassi was trying to answer, the Conte shut the door on him with impatience. "Those fellows," he said to himself, "cannot see power unless it is cloaked in insolence." So saying, this great Minister abandoned himself to an action so ridiculous that we have some misgivings about recording it. He ran to take from his desk a portrait in miniature of the Duchessa, and covered it with passionate kisses. "Forgive me, my dear angel," he cried, "if I did not fling out of the window with my own hands that drudge who dares to speak of you in a tone of familiarity; but, if I am acting with this excess of patience, it is to obey you! And he will lose nothing by waiting."
After a long conversation with the portrait, the Conte, who felt his heart dead in his breast, had the idea of an absurd action, and dashed into it with the eagerness of a child. He sent for a coat on which his decorations were sewn and went to pay a call on the elderly Princess Isotta. Never in his life had he gone to her apartments, except on New Year's Day. He found her surrounded by a number of dogs, and tricked out in all her finery, including diamonds even, as though she were going to court. The Conte having shewn some fear lest he might be upsetting the arrangements of Her Highness, who was probably going out, the lady replied that a Princess of Parma owed it to herself to be always in such array. For the first time since his disaster the Conte felt an impulse of gaiety. "I have done well to appear here," he told himself, "and this very day I must make my declaration." The Princess had been delighted to receive a visit from a man so renowned for his wit, and a Prime Minister; the poor old maid was hardly accustomed to such visitors. The Conte began by an adroit preamble, relative to the immense distance that must always separate from a plain gentleman the members of a reigning family.
"One must draw a distinction," said the Princess: "the daughter of a King of France, for instance, has no hope of ever succeeding to the Throne; but things are not like that in the House of Parma. And that is why we Farnese must always keep up a certain dignity in externals; and I, a poor Princess such as you see me now, I cannot say that it is absolutely impossible that one day you may be my Prime Minister."
This idea, by its fantastic unexpectedness, gave the poor Conte a second momentary thrill of perfect gaiety.
On leaving the apartments of the Princess Isotta, who had blushed deeply on receiving the avowal of the Prime Minister's passion, he met one of the grooms from the Palace: the Prince had sent for him in hot haste.
"I am unwell," replied the Minister, delighted at being able to play a trick on his Prince. "Oh! Oh! You drive me to extremes," he exclaimed in a fury, "and then you expect me to serve you; but learn this, my Prince, that to have received power from Providence is no longer enough in these times: it requires great brains and a strong character to succeed in being a despot."
After dismissing the groom from the Palace, highly scandalised by the perfect health of this invalid, the Conte amused himself by going to see the two men at court who had the greatest influence over General Fabio Conti. The one thing that made the Minister shudder and robbed him of all his courage was that the governor of the citadel was accused of having once before made away with a captain, his personal enemy, by means of theacquetta di Perugia.