Fabrizio read the rest of his paper very slowly; but the expression of his voice was such that before he was halfway through the prayer, everyone was weeping, even Gonzo. "At any rate, I shall not be noticed," thought the Marchesa, bursting into tears.
While he was reading from the paper, Fabrizio found two or three ideas concerning the state of the unhappy man for whom he had come to beg the prayers of the faithful. Presently thoughts came to him in abundance. While he appeared to be addressing the public, he spoke only to the Marchesa. He ended his discourse a little sooner than was usual, because, in spite of his efforts to control them, his tears got the better of him to such a point that he was no longer able to pronounce his words in an intelligible manner. The good judges found this sermon strange but quite equal, in pathos at least, to the famous sermon preached with the lighted candles. As for Clelia, no sooner had she heard the first ten lines of the prayer read by Fabrizio than it seemed to her an atrocious crime to have been able to spend fourteen months without seeing him. On her return home she took to her bed, to be able to think of Fabrizio with perfect freedom; and next morning, at an early hour, Fabrizio received a note couched in the following terms:
"We rely upon your honour; find fourbravi, of whose discretion you can be sure, and to-morrow, when midnight sounds from the Steccata, be by a little door which bears the number 19, in the Strada San Paolo. Remember that you may be attacked, do not come alone."
"We rely upon your honour; find fourbravi, of whose discretion you can be sure, and to-morrow, when midnight sounds from the Steccata, be by a little door which bears the number 19, in the Strada San Paolo. Remember that you may be attacked, do not come alone."
On recognising that heavenly script, Fabrizio fell on his knees and burst into tears. "At last," he cried, "after fourteen months and eight days! Farewell to preaching."
It would take too long to describe all the varieties of folly to which the hearts of Fabrizio and Clelia were a prey that day. The little door indicated in the note was none other than that of the orangery of thepalazzoCrescenzi, and ten times in the day Fabrizio found an excuse to visit it. He armed himself, and alone, shortly before midnight, with a rapid step, was passing by the door when, to his inexpressible joy, he heard a well known voice say in a very low whisper:
"Come in here, friend of my heart."
Fabrizio entered cautiously and found himself actually in the orangery, but opposite a window heavily barred which stood three or four feet above the ground. The darkness was intense. Fabrizio had heard a slight sound in this window, and was exploring the bars with his hand, when he felt another hand, slipped through the bars, take hold of his and carry it to a pair of lips which gave it a kiss.
"It is I," said a dear voice, "who have come here to tell you that I love you, and to ask you if you are willing to obey me."
One may imagine the answer, the joy, the astonishment of Fabrizio; after the first transports, Clelia said to him:
"I have made a vow to the Madonna, as you know, never to see you; that is why I receive you in this profound darkness. I wish you to understand dearly that, should you ever force me to look at you in the daylight, all would be over between us. But first of all, I do not wish you to preach before Annetta Marini, and do not go and think that it was I who was so foolish as to have an armchair carried into the House of God."
"My dear angel, I shall never preach again before anyone; I have been preaching only in the hope that one day I might see you."
"Do not speak like that, remember that it is not permitted to me to see you."
Here we shall ask leave to pass over, without saying a single word about them, an interval of three years.
At the time when our story is resumed, Conte Mosca had long since returned to Parma, as Prime Minister, and was more powerful than ever.
After three years of divine happiness, Fabrizio's heart underwent a caprice of affection which led to a complete change in his circumstances. The Marchesa had a charming little boy two years old, Sandrino, who was his mother's joy; he was always with her or on the knees of the Marchese Crescenzi; Fabrizio, on the other hand, hardly ever saw him; he did not wish him to become accustomed to loving another father. He formed the plan of taking the child away before his memories should have grown distinct.
In the long hours of each day when the Marchesa could not see her lover, Sandrino's company consoled her; for we have to confess a thing which will seem strange north of the Alps; in spite of her errors she had remained true to her vow; she had promised the Madonna, as the reader may perhaps remember, never to see Fabrizio; these had been her exact words; consequently she received him only at night, and there was never any light in the room.
But every evening he was received by his mistress; and, what is worthy of admiration, in the midst of a court devoured by curiosity and envy, Fabrizio's precautions had been so ably calculated that thisamicizia, as it is called in Lombardy, had never even been suspected. Their love was too intense for quarrels not to occur; Clelia was extremely given to jealousy, but almost always their quarrels sprang from another cause. Fabrizio had made use of some public ceremony in order to be in the same place as the Marchesa and to look at her; she then seized a pretext to escape quickly, and for a long time afterwards banished her lover.
Amazement was felt at the court of Parma that no intrigue should be known of a woman so remarkable both for her beauty and for the loftiness of her mind; she gave rise to passions which inspired many foolish actions, and often Fabrizio too was jealous.
The good Archbishop Landriani had long been dead; the piety, the exemplary morals, the eloquence of Fabrizio had made him be forgotten; his own elder brother was dead and all the wealth of his family had come to him. From this time onwards he distributed annually among the vicars and curates of his diocese the hundred odd thousand francs which the Archbishopric of Parma brought him in.
It would be difficult to imagine a life more honoured, more honourable or more useful than Fabrizio had made for himself, when everything was upset by this unfortunate caprice of paternal affection.
"According to the vow which I respect and which nevertheless is the bane of my life, since you refuse to see me during the day," he said once to Clelia, "I am obliged to live perpetually alone, with no other distraction than my work; and besides I have not enough work. In the course of this stern and sad way of passing the long hours of each day, an idea has occurred to me, which is now torturing me, and against which I have been striving in vain for six months: my son will not love me at all; he never hears my name mentioned. Brought up amid all the pleasing luxury of thepalazzoCrescenzi, he barely knows me. On the rare occasions when I do see him, I think of his mother, whose heavenly beauty he recalls to me, and whom I may not see, and he must find me a serious person, which, with children, means sad."
"Well," said the Marchesa, "to what is all this speech leading? It frightens me."
"To my having my son; I wish him to live with me; I wish to see him every day; I wish him to grow accustomed to loving me; I wish to love him myself at my leisure. Since a fatality without counterpart in the world decrees that I must be deprived of that happiness which so many other tender hearts enjoy, and forbids me to pass my life with all that I adore, I wish at least to have beside me a creature who recalls you to my heart, who to some extent takes your place. Men and affairs are a burden to me in my enforced solitude; you know that ambition has always been a vain word to me, since the moment when I had the good fortune to be locked up by Barbone; and anything that is not felt in my heart seems to me fatuous in the melancholy which in your absence overwhelms me."
One can imagine the keen anguish with which her lover's grief filled the heart of poor Clelia; her sorrow was all the more intense, as she felt that Fabrizio had some justification. She went the length of wondering whether she ought not to try to obtain a release from her vow. Then she would receive Fabrizio during the day like any other person in society, and her reputation for sagacity was too well established for any scandal to arise. She told herself that by spending enough money she could procure a dispensation from her vow; but she felt also that this purely worldly arrangement would not set her conscience at rest, and that an angry heaven might perhaps punish her for this fresh crime.
On the other hand, if she consented to yield to so natural a desire on the part of Fabrizio, if she sought not to hurt that tender heart which she knew so well, and whose tranquillity her singular vow so strangely jeopardised, what chance was there of abducting the only son of one of the greatest nobles in Italy without the fraud's being discovered? The Marchese Crescenzi would spend enormous sums, would himself conduct the investigations, and sooner or later the facts of the abduction would become known. There was only one way of meeting this danger, the child must be sent abroad, to Edinburgh, for instance, or to Paris; but this was a course to which the mother's affection could never consent. The other plan proposed by Fabrizio, which was indeed the more reasonable of the two, had something sinister about it, and was almost more alarming still in the eyes of this despairing mother; she must, said Fabrizio, feign an illness for the child; he would grow steadily worse, until finally he died in the Marchese Crescenzi's absence.
A repugnance which, in Clelia, amounted to terror, caused a rupture that could not last.
Clelia insisted that they must not tempt God; that this beloved son was the fruit of a crime, and that if they provoked the divine anger further, God would not fail to call him back to Himself. Fabrizio spoke again of his strange destiny: "The station to which chance has called me," he said to Clelia, "and my love oblige me to dwell in an eternal solitude, I cannot, like the majority of my brethren, taste the pleasures of an intimate society, since you will receive me only in the darkness, which reduces to a few moments, so to speak, the part of my life which I may spend with you."
Tears flowed in abundance. Clelia fell ill; but she loved Fabrizio too well to maintain her opposition to the terrible sacrifice that he demanded of her. Apparently, Sandrino fell ill; the Marchese sent in haste for the most celebrated doctors, and Clelia at once encountered a terrible difficulty which she had not foreseen: she must prevent this adored child from taking any of the remedies ordered by the doctors; it was no small matter.
The child, kept in bed longer than was good for his health, became really ill. How was one to explain to the doctors the cause of his malady? Torn asunder by two conflicting interests both so dear to her, Clelia was within an ace of losing her reason. Must she consent to an apparent recovery, and so sacrifice all the results of that long and painful make-believe? Fabrizio, for his part, could neither forgive himself the violence he was doing to the heart of his mistress nor abandon his project. He had found a way of being admitted every night to the sick child's room, which had led to another complication. The Marchesa came to attend to her son, and sometimes Fabrizio was obliged to see her by candle-light, which seemed to the poor sick heart of Clelia a horrible sin and one that foreboded the death of Sandrino. In vain had the most famous casuists, consulted as to the necessity of adherence to a vow in a case where its performance would obviously do harm, replied that the vow could not be regarded as broken in a criminal fashion, so long as the person bound by a promise to God failed to keep that promise not for a vain pleasure of the senses but so as not to cause an obvious evil. The Marchesa was none the less in despair, and Fabrizio could see the time coming when his strange idea was going to bring about the death of Clelia and that of his son.
He had recourse to his intimate friend, Conte Mosca, who, for all the old Minister that he was, was moved by this tale of love of which to a great extent he had been ignorant.
"I can procure for you the Marchese's absence for five or six days at least: when do you require it?"
A little later, Fabrizio came to inform the Conte that everything was in readiness now for them to take advantage of the Marchese's absence.
Two days after this, as the Marchese was riding home from one of his estates in the neighbourhood of Mantua, a party of brigands, evidently hired to execute some personal vengeance, carried him off, without maltreating him in any way, and placed him in a boat which took three days to travel down the Po, making the same journey that Fabrizio had made long ago, after the famous affair with Giletti. On the fourth day, the brigands marooned the Marchese on a desert island in the Po, taking care first to rob him completely, and to leave him no money or other object that had the slightest value. It was two whole days before the Marchese managed to reach hispalazzoin Parma; he found it draped in black and all his household in mourning.
This abduction, very skilfully carried out, had a deplorable consequence: Sandrino, secretly installed in a large and fine house where the Marchesa came to see him almost every day, died after a few months. Clelia imagined herself to have been visited with a just punishment, for having been unfaithful to her vow to the Madonna: she had seen Fabrizio so often by candle-light, and indeed twice in broad daylight and with such rapturous affection, during Sandrino's illness. She survived by a few months only this beloved son, but had the joy of dying in the arms of her lover.
Fabrizio was too much in love and too religious to have recourse to suicide; he hoped to meet Clelia again in a better world, but he had too much intelligence not to feel that he had first to atone for many faults.
A few days after Clelia's death, he signed several settlements by which he assured a pension of one thousand francs to each of his servants, and reserved a similar pension for himself; he gave landed property, of an annual value of 100,000 lire or thereabouts, to Contessa Mosca; a similar estate to the Marchesa del Dongo, his mother, and such residue as there might be of the paternal fortune to one of his sisters who was poorly married. On the following day, having forwarded to the proper authorities his resignation of his Archbishopric and of all the posts which the favour of Ernesto V and the Prime Minister's friendship had successively heaped upon him, he retired to theCharterhouse of Parma, situated in the woods adjoining the Po, two leagues from Sacca.
Contessa Mosca had strongly approved, at the time, her husband's return to office, but she herself would never on any account consent to cross the frontier of the States of Ernesto V. She held her court at Vignano, a quarter of a league from Casalmaggiore, on the left bank of the Po, and consequently in the Austrian States. In this magnificent palace of Vignano, which the Conte had built for her, she entertained every Thursday all the high society of Parma, and every day her own many friends. Fabrizio had never missed a day in going to Vignano. The Contessa, in a word, combined all the outward appearances of happiness, but she lived for a very short time only after Fabrizio, whom she adored, and who spent but one year in his Charterhouse.
The prisons of Parma were empty, the Conte immensely rich, Ernesto V adored by his subjects, who compared his rule to that of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany.
This translation ofLa Chartreuse de Parmehas been made from the reprint in two volumes of the first edition (Paris, Les éditions G. Grès et Cie. MCMXXII), with reference also to the stereotyped edition published by MM. Calmann Lévy and to the reprint issued by M. Flammarion in his series,Les meilleurs auteurs classiques(1921). I am also indebted to the extremely literal version by Signora Maria Ortiz (Biblioteca Sansoniana Straniera—La Certosa di Parma—G. C. Sansoni, Firenze, 1922), which has thrown a ray of light on several dark passages.
TheChartreusewas written in (and not a distance of three hundred leagues from) Paris, and in the short interval between November 4, 1838, and December 26 of that year. So much the author reveals in a note, which I do not translate: "The Char, made 4 novembre 1838—26 décembre id. The 3 septembre 1838, I had the idea of the Char. I begined it after a tour in Britanny, I suppose, or to the Havre. I begined the 4 nov. till the 26 décembre. The 26 dec. I send the 6 énormes cahiers to Kol. for les faire voir to the bookseller." His object in pretending to have written the book in 1830 may have been to establish a prescriptive immunity from any charge of traducing the government of Louis-Philippe; if so, it is by a characteristic slip that he speaks of having written ittowards the end of1830.
Kol., otherwise Romain Colomb, Beyle's executor, relates in theNotice Biographiqueprefixed toArmancethat in January, 1839, while theChartreusewas going through the press, acahierof sixty pages of the manuscript was mislaid. Unable to find it among the mass of papers that littered his room, Beyle rewrote the sixty pages, and the new version was already in type when he told Colomb of his loss. Colomb at once searched for and found the missingcahier, whereupon Beyle, "stupefied by the ease of my discovery, dreading, in a sense, the sight of this manuscript, would not even glance over it, much less compare it with the pages that had taken its place."
It was published in March, 1839. In the same year, Beyle began to correct, reduce and amplify the whole work, before he was moved by Balzac's criticism to condense the first fifty-four pages into four or five. Three copies thus annotated are in existence, one of which has been reproduced in facsimile in an extremely limited edition: (Paris, Edouard Champion, 3 vols. 1921—100 copies only.) In 1904 M. Casimir Stryienski reprinted in the first volume ofLes Soirées du Stendhal Club(Mercure de France) the two fragments of which a translation follows. The first is intended for inclusion in Chapter V, in the brief account of Fabrizio's convalescence at Amiens. Colonel Le Baron, the wounded officer whom he met and left at the White Horse Inn at the end of Chapter IV, is now re-introduced as returning to his family at Amiens, and a story is told them which supersedes the account of General Pietranera's death in Chapter II. The second fragment is a small expansion of the already over-long Chapter VI.
Visitors to Parma will look in vain for most of the architectural monuments which met the gaze of Fabrizio. The Torre Farnese has never existed, though it may have been suggested, as to mass, by the huge fragment of the Palazzo Farnese at Piacenza, as well as by the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, and as to origin, by the story of Parisina and Ugo d'Este, told in English by Gibbon and Byron. In appearance, it would have been not unlike the tower, also damaged by an earthquake, which stands in the background of Mantegna's fresco of theMartyrdom of Saint James, in the Church of the Eremitani at Padua. The problem of how a road running out of Parma to the south could lead directly to Sacca and the Po is as insoluble as that of the guarded permission given to Fabrizio in 1815 to read the novels of Walter Scott.
The Steccata of course exists, and the Church of San Giovanni, but the latter is singularly bare of monumental tombs. There is even a Charterhouse, at San Lazzaro Parmense, though it has escaped the attention of Baedeker. There were Farnese, but the last of them died, of the pleasures of the table, in 1731; a portrait of him in his corpulence may be seen by the curious in the Reale Galleria in the Piletta—another large Farnese Palace also unfinished. There is indeed a Cathedral, but there is no Archbishop, and the Bishop's Palace is an untidy piece of patched-up antiquity.
It is probable that Beyle was led to place the scene of his story at Parma, which, inRome, Naples et Florence, he had dismissed, not unjustly, asville d'ailleurs assez plate, precisely because there was not, in 1838, any reigningdynastyin that State. The Duchy of Parma was held and admirably governed by Marie-Louise, the wife and widow of Napoleon, from 1815 until after Beyle's death in 1843, when she was still in the prime of life, being by some years his junior. Suddenly, in 1847, she died. The Bourbon dynasty, which had been transplanted to the brief Kingdom of Etruria, and in 1814 had been placated with the Republic of Lucca as a temporary Duchy (which Charles II had finally sold, a few months earlier, to its legal heir, the Grand Duke of Tuscany), returned, and rapidly converted Stendhal's fiction into historical fact. Charles II was almost at once obliged to abdicate. His son, Charles III, proceeded to emulate the career of Ranuccio-Ernesto IV until, in 1854, he met a similar fate. His widow, a daughter of the Duc de Berri, then acted as Regent for her son Robert I, until in 1859 the Risorgimento swept them for ever from their Duchy. Duke Robert died in 1907, the father of twenty children, one of whom, Prince Sixte de Bourbon-Parme, shewed in the late war some reflexion of the spirit of Fabrizio del Dongo, as the curious English reader may find in my translation of hisL'Autriche et la paix séparée(Austria's Peace Offer, London, Constable and Co., Ltd., 1921). Another is the Empress Zita, while a third has re-established the Bourbon dynasty in Northern Europe by becoming the father of the Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg.
Francesco Hayez, the Milanese painter immortalised by his decoration of thepalazzoCrescenzi and by his portrait of Fabrizio del Dongo, died at a great age in 1882, having outlived the date appointed by Beyle for his own immortality.
C. K. S. M.
Fabrizio, well received in this house which seemed to him very pleasant, sought never to speak of the battle, since memories of that sort depressed the Colonel; but as he thought without ceasing of the details of which he had been a witness, he would sometimes return to the topic; then the Colonel placed a finger on his lips with a smile, and spoke of something else. On the other hand, Fabrizio was careful never to say anything that might let it be guessed by what succession of chances he had been brought into the neighbourhood of Waterloo. The ladies especially were constantly placing him under the necessity of finding polite answers which should tell them nothing of what they desired to know. At every moment, by phrases which betrayed the keenest interest, they placed him under the necessity of telling them something; but he got well out of the trap and the ladies knew absolutely nothing, except that he was called Vasi, and even then they had good reason to believe that this name was assumed.
Colonel Le Baron, his wife and the ladies of their acquaintance were therefore devoured by curiosity, this young man's adventures must indeed be extraordinary.
"All that I can say positively," repeated the Colonel, "is that he is endowed with the truest courage, the most simple, the most innocent, so to speak. When I was so stupid as to set him on picket at the head of the bridge of La Sainte, and he fought there, one against ten, I would wager that he was drawing a sabre for the first time."
"And his passport which you went to verify at the municipality is really made out: Vasi, dealer in barometers, travelling with his wares?" . . .
The ladies, that day, plied him with a thousand artful questions about the barometers, he extricated himself with a laugh and very neatly; they consulted him as to the state of the barometer in the house, which they put in his hands, he remembered the tone that, in similar circumstances, Conte Pietranera would have adopted, and, justified by the fun that was being made of him, replied in a tone of the most lively gallantry. His appearance was so modest and his tone was in so strange a contrast to his ordinary manner that it was by no means ill received, the ladies went into fits of laughter. That same evening the Colonel said to them:
"Chance has just offered me a way of finding out our young man's position; you know that resurrected-looking creature who has come to him from Italy, the man is a lawyer and is called Birague, but besides that he is dying of fright; he speaks bad French, but I hope that his gibberish may not offend you, for he is so driven by fear that each of his sentences says something. This morning, this lawyer who, for some days, has always followed me with his eye at thecafé, has at last found an excuse for, as he says, presenting his respects to me; I at once thought that perhaps you would deign not to be put off by his speech, which for that matter greatly resembles your young favourite's; and so I have invited this strange creature to take tea with us this evening, and, if you give me leave, I shall now send Beloir to fetch him from thecafé."
Ten minutes later, Trooper Beloir announced at the door of the drawing-room: "M. Birague,avocat."
The conversation lasted for fully two hours, the ladies heaped every attention on the poor lawyer, who did everything in his power to please them, but it was in vain that they sought to extract from him anything that bore upon Fabrizio; they had lost patience with his discretion, which was not lacking in polite forms of speech, when the Colonel exclaimed:
"I must say, my dearavocat, that you are a very brave man, how could you dare enter France in the present state of things? They are kind enough to give me in the army a certain reputation for bravery, but I must confess to you that in your place, and (I tell you frankly) speaking a French so different from that spoken by the natives of the country, I should never have ventured to penetrate into so disturbed a country. Now I see that you have made a conquest of these ladies, you have an air of sincerity which pleases me and I should like to give you my protection. Madame's uncle is Mayor of Amiens; I ought to tell you that, since you are not recommended by an Ambassador, your fate lies in his hands. M. le Maire Leborgne has a savage nature, he will never believe that you have come to Amiens for your health," and so forth.
The ladies were quick in taking the hint given them by the Colonel; they took the utmost pains to give the Milanese lawyer a strong impression of the cruel nature of the worthy M. Leborgne, Mayor of Amiens. Birague turned paler than his shirt, than the white cravat and enormous hat in which he had attired himself that evening to be presented to ladies; but he found himself so well treated that finally about eleven o'clock he ventured to ask the Colonel if he had any horses. The Colonel asked him whether, at that time of night, he wished to go for a ride, saying that he had only two horses, which indeed were a pair of screws, but that he placed them willingly at his service.
"I should not think of going out by the gate at this hour, and running the risk of seeing myself questioned by the police, but I find so estimable a humanity in your heart and in the hearts of these good ladies that I venture to make a request of you; allow me to spend the night in your horses' hayloft: as it is an idea that has just occurred to me, the terrible Mayor Leborgne would never hear of it and I should spend one night at least in peace and quiet. I am lodging with His Excellency, M. Vasi, but he has committed the imprudence, as a matter of fact long before my arrival, of refusing to see any more of the Duprez family, who are greatly annoyed and who, I have no doubt, would be glad to have their revenge. I have not attempted to hide my feelings in the matter from M. Vasi, I have taken the liberty of saying that this step was rash on his part; but your experience, Monsieur le Colonel, must have taught you what the rashness of youth is. M. Vasi's answer was that he would have been stifled by boredom if he had continued to spend his evenings with the Duprez family.
"In the present state of things, the Duprez, who, no doubt, desire to be avenged, will not dare to attack a man like M. Vasi, but they will take it out of a poor devil like myself," and so on.
The Colonel ended by giving M. Birague a letter of recommendation addressed to the Mayor of Amiens, in which he declared that he would answer with his life for M. Birague, a respectable lawyer of Milan, whom he had known when he was stationed in that city.
"Carry this letter on you while you are on your way to the Grand Monarque, and burn all the written or printed documents which you may have in your room; spend a quiet night, but you see that I am answering for you, come to-morrow and tell me your whole history so that, if the Mayor questions me closely, I can make a show of having known you for a long time; say nothing to M. Vasi of what I am doing for you."
One may imagine whether this evening was amusing for the ladies, but they were afraid of having alarmed M. Birague unduly.
"Really, the man's appearance was incredible," said Mme. Le Baron.
"But," put in one of her friends, "it becomes more and more likely that our youngprotégéVasi is a man of consequence in his own country."
The Colonel had to employ stratagems for a week; M. Birague spoke as freely as could be desired of his own affairs, but was impenetrable on everything that related to Fabrizio. Mme. Le Baron and her friends invited him to luncheon one day when the Colonel was absent and played so cruelly upon M. Birague's alarm that he ended by saying to them with tears:
"Oh, well, I see that you are good ladies, I see that you would not wish to ruin me, you have immense influence with the Mayor of Amiens, give me your word that you will obtain for me a passport for England signed by the Mayor and I shall at least be able to fly to London in case of danger; my father ordered me to travel by London so as to be able to return to Milan without fear of Barone Binder, the Chief of Police there; he is a man of the same sort as your Mayor, it is not easy to get out of his prisons, once one has got into them."
"Very well," exclaimed Mme. Le Baron, "if you are frank with us, I give you my word that to-morrow you shall have your passport for London; we wish no harm to M. Vasi, far from it, this lady," she pointed to the youngest of her friends, "has a tender regard for him."
Birague was slightly astonished by the shout of laughter which greeted this admission; he had some difficulty in replying with any clarity to the hundred questions by which he was at once overwhelmed.
The ladies knew already that Vasi was an assumed name, that Fabrizio del Dongo was the second son of the Marchese del Dongo, Second Grand Majordomo Major of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, one of the greatest noblemen in that country, to whom his, Birague's father, was steward. On the news of Napoleon's landing from the Gulf of Granti, in June, regardless of the alarm of his aunt and mother, Fabrizio had fled from his father's magnificent castle, situated at Grianta, on the Lake of Como, six leagues from the Swiss frontier.
Birague was at this stage in his narrative when the Colonel returned; he was told all that Birague had already said; as his regiment had been stationed for some time at Lodi, a few leagues from Milan, he knew all the principal personages of the court of Prince Eugène.
"What," he cried, "that Contessa Gina Pietranera, of whom you are speaking to these ladies as the aunt of Fabrizio, is she that famous Contessa Pietranera, the most beautiful woman in Milan in the days of the Viceroy, whose word was law at his court?"
"The very same, Colonel."
"And what age might she be now?"
"Twenty-seven or twenty-eight; she is more beautiful than ever, but she is completely ruined, her husband was murdered in what they called a duel, and the Contessa was furious at not being able to avenge his death: the General was out shooting in the mountains of Bergamo with some officers of the Ultra Party; he, as you know, although belonging to a family of the old nobility, had always served with the troops of the Cisalpine Republic; there was a luncheon in the course of this shooting party, one of the Ultra officers took the liberty of belittling the courage of the Cisalpine troops; the General struck him a blow, the luncheon was interrupted; as they had no weapons but guns, they fought with those, the poor General fell stone dead, with two bullets in his body; but the details of this duel made such a stir in Milan that all the officers who had been present were obliged to go and travel in Switzerland. The local surgeon who examined the General's body certified that the bullet which caused his death had entered from the back. This statement by the surgeon came to the Signor Barone Binder, Director General of the Police, Contessa Pietranera knew of it at once, for she can do anything she likes at Milan; all the important people of the place are her friends and are at her service. Twenty-four hours later, there arrived a second statement by the country surgeon from the Bergamo district; it contradicted the first and stated that the bullet which caused the death had entered by the stomach and that the second bullet which had passed through the thigh had also entered from in front; but they said that this surgeon had received a large sum of money. On the very night after the arrival of this second statement, the officers who had been present at the duel left for Switzerland; the funeral was held next day; they were afraid of being mobbed by the crowd, and the strangest thing of all was that the surgeon also left for Switzerland, where he still is. He has never dared to shew his face again his own neighbourhood; the Bergamasks have sworn to exterminate him; and they don't take things lightly in that part of the world. It was after that that there was the famous quarrel between Signora Pietranera and her friend Limercati."
"What, is that the famous Limercati who, in 1811, had such fine English horses, seven of them?"
"No doubt, Lodovico Limercati; he had forty horses in his stables, he has an income of over two hundred thousand lire; my cousin Ercole is his factor; but there's a bad relation for you, he has never thought of employing me as lawyer to the rich Limercati estate."
"It is terrible, frightful," cried Mme. Le Baron, "but you spoke of a letter which, I must tell you, excites my curiosity greatly."
Conte Zurla, the Minister of the Interior, brought to Signora Sanseverina's Conte Zorafi, who was the Press of Parma.
At the gatherings at which he appeared, that silence, which is often painful at official gatherings, could not find a place, and, in a country which has a terrible police and a State Prison the tower of which, one hundred and eighty feet high, may be seen at the end of every street, all gatherings of more than two persons may be considered official.
One thing that may be said in praise of Zorafi is that he was no more of a spy than any other gentleman at court; in fact, at heart he was ridiculous, but not at all wicked. No other gentleman at court could, without risk to his friends, have seen the Sovereign daily. Zorafi fancied himself a Minister, and was afraid of Conte Mosca. At the same time he was obliged, ten times in a month perhaps, to speak evil of him. When the Conte had scored a marked success in any affair, he was certain to be blamed, the day after, by the Prince's Press.
Conte Zorafi was a man of spirit who could not bear to have fifty napoleons in his desk. As soon as he saw that sum, or indeed a much less considerable sum in his possession, he would think of spending it. For instance, on the day on which we shall do him the honour of presenting him to the reader, he will have just bought for forty-five napoleons a magnificent English lustre. The purchase made, not knowing where to place it and already caring less about it, he has asked Prinote, the famous jeweller, to keep it in his shop.
This Conte had spent his youth in composing sonnets in an emphatic style over which the people of Lombardy had gone so mad as to compare them to the sonnets of Monti. Now, in some connexion or other, someone had ventured to say in public that this style, which was so emphatic, was emphatic with the simple character of Napoleon; it had required only this comment to make Zorafi's sonnets fall into disrepute.
And, a surprising thing, Zorafi, whose character was precisely that of a conceited child, had not shewn the slightest annoyance. Besides what was more serious than the decline of his sonnets, he had an income of barely nine or ten thousand lire and spent twenty-five.
In spite of these 25,000 lire he frequently had debts, and these debts were paid every year by an unseen hand.
What then was Zorafi? He was the Prince'sPress.
He was a Conte, as everyone is in Italy, but besides that he had enjoyed the greatest literary renown for ten years. Zorafi was not at all wicked, or at least had only the ill temper of a child. He had the purest Sienese accent. The sentences flowed from his lips with a perfect facility, he spoke of everything with charm, in a word nothing would have been lacking if from time to time he could have found some idea to place in his sentences.
A little time since, the Prince had given Zorafi a carriage, but this was on condition of his paying at least twenty-five visits daily.
"It does not suit me at present to have a newspaper printed," the Prince had said to him in making him a present of the carriage, with horses attached, and a coachman and groom to boot. "A newspaper conducted by a man of your sort would have a crowd of subscribers; very well, have a crowd of friends and tell them, with the spirit for which you are distinguished, the articles that you would print, if you had the privilege of the newspaper. One day, you shall have this newspaper, and it will bring you in an income of 50,000 lire. For I shall give you plenty of liberty, you will speak of the measures adopted by my Government."
Once they had observed this mania in Zorafi, people listened to him in society, as in another place they read theJournal Officiel.