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THE CHARTREUSE OF PARMA
[Illustration: M Beyle (Stendhal)]
[Illustration]
THE CHARTREUSE
OF
PARMA
Translated from the French of
STENDHAL (Henri Beyle)
By
THE LADY MARY LOYD
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON & CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1901.
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Transcriber’s Note: This table of contents has been added for the
convenience of the reader.
LIFE OF STENDHAL v
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION vii
CHAPTER I 1
CHAPTER II 15
CHAPTER III 36
CHAPTER IV 53
CHAPTER V 73
CHAPTER VI 96
CHAPTER VII 136
CHAPTER VIII 155
CHAPTER IX 171
CHAPTER X 181
CHAPTER XI 189
CHAPTER XII 213
CHAPTER XIII 227
CHAPTER XIV 253
CHAPTER XV 274
CHAPTER XVI 291
CHAPTER XVII 308
CHAPTER XVIII 323
CHAPTER XIX 343
CHAPTER XX 360
CHAPTER XXI 385
CHAPTER XXII 406
CHAPTER XXIII 424
CHAPTER XXIV 446
CHAPTER XXV 466
CHAPTER XXVI 486
CHAPTER XXVII 503
CHAPTER XXVIII 518
LIFE OF STENDHAL
_MARIE HENRI BEYLE, who called himself STENDHAL, was born at Grenoble
on the 23d of January, 1783. His father, Joseph Chérubin Beyle, was a
lawyer and a member of the parliament of Dauphiné. His childhood and
boyhood, excited by echoes of the Revolution, but repressed in the bosom
of a royalist and conservative family, were turbulent and distressing; in
later years Grenoble was to him “like the recollection of an abominable
indigestion.” He escaped from it in 1799, and spent a short time in the
War Office in Paris. In 1800 he went off to the wars, saw Italy for
the first time, was present at the battle of Marengo, and fought his
first duel at Milan. From 1801 to 1806 Beyle was in Paris and Grenoble,
much occupied with affairs of the heart. In the latter year he entered
Napoleon’s army, and remained in it until after the retreat from Moscow
in 1814. He was made “intendant militaire,” and his zeal commended him
to the Emperor. On one occasion, called upon to raise five million
francs from a German state, Beyle produced seven millions. He seems to
have been one of the few officers who kept their heads in the flood of
disaster; during the retreat from Russia he was always clean-shaved
and perfectly dressed. But the fatigues of 1814 shattered his health,
and the ruin of Napoleon his hopes; he was obliged to withdraw to Como
to recover his composure. He refused an administrative post in Paris
under the new government, and settled definitely at Milan. His career
of violent action had exhausted his spirits; he now adopted the mode
of life of a dilettante. He gave himself up to music, books, and love.
His first work, the “Letters Written from Vienna,” appeared in 1814;
this essay, a musical criticism, was followed in 1817 by the “History of
Italian Painting,” and “Rome, Naples, and Florence.” He became poor, and
in 1821, being suspected of Italianism, was expelled from Milan by the
Austrian police; he took refuge in Paris. Stendhal’s essay on “Love,”
the earliest of his really remarkable books, was published in 1822, but
attracted no attention whatever; in eleven years only seventeen copies
of it were sold. His first novel, “Armance,” belongs to 1827. In 1830
he was appointed consul at Trieste, and while he was there the great
novel, “Le Rouge et le Noir,” appeared in Paris without attracting any
attention. Stendhal was so miserable at Trieste that he contrived to
exchange his consulate for that of Civita Vecchia, which he held until
he died. In spite of the complete and astonishing failures of each of
his successive books, he continued to add to their number. He had but
“one hundred readers” in all Europe, but these he continued to address.
In 1838 he published a mystification, the supposed “Memoirs in France”
of a commercial traveller. Stendhal did not taste literary success in
any degree whatever until, in 1839, and at the age of fifty-six, he
produced “La Chartreuse de Parme.” This novel gave him fame, but he did
not long enjoy it. On the 23d of March, 1842, having reached his sixtieth
year, he died in Paris, after a stroke of paralysis. He lies buried at
Montmartre, under the epitaph, in Italian, which he had written for the
purpose: “Here lies Arrigo Beyle, the Milanese. Lived, Wrote, Died.” The
life of Stendhal was obscure and isolated throughout; but since his death
he has excited boundless curiosity, and his influence has been steadily
advancing. He said of himself that he could afford to wait, that he would
certainly be appreciated in 1880. He proved himself a true prophet, for
it was just forty years after his death that his reputation reached its
highest pinnacle, and that, with the discovery of his Correspondence,
Stendhal entered into his glory._
_E. G._
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
This novel was written in the year 1830, in a place some three hundred
leagues from Paris. Many years before that, when our armies were pouring
across Europe, I chanced to be billeted in the house of a canon. It
was at Padua—a fortunate city, where, as in Venice, men’s pleasure is
their chief business, and leaves them little time for anger with their
neighbours. My stay was of some duration, and a friendship sprang up
between the canon and myself.
Passing through Padua again, in 1830, I hurried to the good canon’s
house. He was dead, I knew, but I had set my heart on looking once more
upon the room in which we had spent many a pleasant evening, sadly
remembered in later days. I found the canon’s nephew, and his wife, who
both received me like an old friend. A few acquaintances dropped in, and
the party did not break up till a late hour. The nephew had an excellent
_sambaglione_ fetched from the Café Pedrocchi. But what especially caused
us to linger was the story of the Duchess Sanseverina, to which some
chance allusion was made, and the whole of which the nephew was good
enough to relate, for my benefit.
“In the country whither I am bound,” said I to my friends, “I am very
unlikely to find a house like this one. To while away the long evenings
I will write a novel on the life of your charming Duchess Sanseverina.
I will follow in the steps of that old story-teller of yours, Bandello,
Bishop of Agen, who would have thought it a crime to overlook the true
incidents of his tale, or add others to it.”
“In that case,” quoth the nephew, “I will lend you my uncle’s diaries.
Under the head of Parma he mentions some of the court intrigues of that
place, at the period when the influence of the duchess was supreme. But
beware! it is anything but a moral tale, and now that you French people
pique yourselves on your Gospel purity, it may earn you a highly criminal
reputation.”
I send forth my novel without having made any change in the manuscript
written in 1830. This course may present two drawbacks:
The first affects the reader. The characters, being Italian, may not
interest him, for the hearts and souls of that nation are very different
from the hearts and souls of Frenchmen. The Italians are a sincere and
worthy folk, who, except when they are offended, say what they think.
Vanity only attacks them in fits. Then it becomes a passion, and is known
as _puntiglio_. And, further, among this nation poverty is not considered
a cause of ridicule.
The second drawback is connected with the author.
I will avow that I have been bold enough to leave my personages in
possession of the natural roughnesses of their various characters. But to
atone for this—and I proclaim it loudly—I cast blame of the most highly
moral nature upon many of their actions. Where would be the use of my
endowing them with the high morality and pleasing charm of the French,
who love money above every other thing, and are seldom led into sin
either by love or hate? The Italians of my novel are of a very different
stamp. And, indeed, it appears to me that every stage of six hundred
miles northward from the regions of the South brings us to a different
landscape, and to a different kind of novel. The old canon’s charming
niece had known the duchess, and had even been very much attached to her.
She has begged me not to alter anything concerning these adventures of
her friend, which are certainly open to censure.
_January 23, 1839._
THE CHARTREUSE OF PARMA
CHAPTER I
MILAN IN 1796
On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte marched into the city of
Milan, at the head of the youthful army which had just crossed the Bridge
of Lodi, and taught the world that, after the lapse of centuries, Cæsar
and Alexander had found a successor at last.
The prodigies of genius and daring witnessed by Italy in the course of a
few months, roused her people from their slumbers. But one week before
the arrival of the French, the Milanese still took them for a horde of
brigands, whose habit it was to fly before the troops of his Royal and
Imperial Majesty. Such, at all events, was the information repeated three
times a week in their little newspaper, no bigger than a man’s hand, and
printed on dirty-looking paper.
In the middle ages, the Milanese had been as brave as the French of the
Revolution, and their courage earned the complete destruction of their
city by the German emperor. But their chief occupation, since they had
become his “_faithful subjects_,” was to print sonnets on pink silk
handkerchiefs whenever any rich or well-born young lady was given in
marriage. Two or three years after that great epoch in her life the
said young lady chose herself a _cavaliere servente_; the name of this
_cicisbeo_, selected by the husband’s family, occasionally held an
honoured place in the marriage contract. Between such effeminate habits
and the deep emotions stirred by the unexpected arrival of the French
army, a great gulf lay. Before long a new and passionate order of things
had supervened. On May 15, 1796, a whole people became aware that all
it had hitherto respected was supremely ridiculous, and occasionally
hateful, to boot. The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the
downfall of the old ideas. To expose one’s life became the fashionable
thing. People perceived, after these centuries of hypocrisy and
insipidities, that the only chance of happiness lay in loving with
real passion, and knowing how to risk one’s life upon occasion. The
continuance of the watchful despotism of Charles V and Philip II had
plunged the Lombards into impenetrable darkness. They overthrew these
rulers’ statues, and forthwith found themselves bathed in light. For
fifty years, while Voltaire’s Encyclopédie was appearing in France, the
monks had been assuring the good folk of Milan that to learn to read, or
to learn anything on earth, was idle vexation of the spirit, and that if
they would only pay their priest’s dues honestly, and tell him all their
small sins faithfully, they were almost certain to secure a comfortable
place in paradise. To complete the emasculation of this whilom doughty
people, the Austrian had sold them, on moderate terms, the privilege of
not furnishing recruits to the imperial army.
In 1796, the Milanese army consisted of eighty “_facchini_” in red
coats, who kept guard over the town, assisted by four splendid Hungarian
regiments. Morals were exceedingly loose, but real passion excessively
rare. Apart from the inconvenience of being obliged to tell everything
to his priest, the Milanese of the period of 1790 really did not know
the meaning of any vehement desire. The worthy citizens were still
trammelled by certain monarchical bonds, which had their vexatious side.
For instance, the archduke, who resided in the city and governed it in
the Emperor’s name, had pitched on the very lucrative notion of dealing
in corn stuffs. Consequently, no peasant could sell his crops until his
Imperial Highness had filled up his granaries.
In May, 1796, three days after the entry of the French, a young miniature
painter of the name of Gros, rather a mad fellow—he has since become
famous—who had arrived with the troops, heard somebody at the Café dei
Servi, then a fashionable resort, relate the doings of the archduke, who
was a very fat man. Seizing the list of ices, printed on a slip of common
yellowish paper, he sketched on its blank side the portly archduke, with
immoderate quantities of corn, instead of blood, pouring out of the
hole in his stomach, made by a French soldier’s bayonet. In this land
of crafty despotism, that which we call jest or caricature was unknown.
The drawing left by Gros on the _café_ table acted like a miracle from
heaven. During the night the sketch was engraved; on the morrow twenty
thousand copies of it were sold.
That same day the walls were posted with the proclamation of a war tax of
six millions of francs, levied for the support of the French army, which,
though it had just won six battles and conquered twenty provinces, was
short of shoes, pantaloons, coats, and hats.
So great was the volume of happiness and pleasure which poured into
Lombardy with these Frenchmen, poor as they were, that nobody, save
the priests and a few nobles, perceived the weight of the tax, which
was soon followed by many others. The French soldiers laughed and sang
from morning till night. They were all of them under five-and-twenty,
and their general in chief, who numbered twenty-seven years, was said
to be the oldest man in his command. All this youth and mirth and gay
carelessness made cheery answer to the furious sermons of the monks, who
for six months past had been asserting from the pulpit of every sacred
edifice that these Frenchmen were all monsters, forced, on pain of death,
to burn down everything, and cut off every head, and that for this last
purpose a guillotine was borne at the head of every regiment.
In country places the French soldier was to be seen sitting at cottage
doors rocking the owner’s baby; and almost every evening some drummer
would tune up his violin, and dancing would begin. The French square
dances were far too difficult and complicated to be taught to the peasant
women by the soldiers, who, indeed, knew but little about them. So it was
the women who taught the Frenchmen the _monferino_, the _saltarello_,
and other Italian dances.
The officers had been billeted, as far as possible, upon rich families.
They were in sore need of an opportunity to retrieve past losses. A
lieutenant named Robert, for instance, was billeted in the palace of
the Marchesa del Dongo. When this officer, a tolerably handy young
recruit, entered into occupation of his apartment, his sole worldly
wealth consisted of a six-franc piece, which had been paid him at
Piacenza. After the passage of the Bridge of Lodi he had stripped a
handsome Austrian officer, killed by a round shot, of a splendid new pair
of nankeen pantaloons. Never did garment appear at a more appropriate
moment! His officer’s epaulets were woollen, and the cloth of his coat
was sewed to the sleeve linings, to keep the bits together. A yet more
melancholy circumstance was that the soles of his shoes were composed
of portions of hats, picked up on the battle-field beyond the Bridge of
Lodi. These improvised soles were bound to his shoes by strings, which
were aggressively visible—so much so, in fact, that when the major-domo
of the household made his appearance in Robert’s room, to invite him to
dine with the marchesa, the lieutenant was cast into a state of mortal
confusion. He and his orderly spent the two hours intervening before the
dreaded repast in trying to stitch the coat together, and dye the unlucky
shoe-strings with ink. At last the awful moment struck. “Never in all my
life did I feel so uncomfortable,” said Lieutenant Robert to me. “The
ladies thought I was going to frighten them—but I trembled much more than
they! I kept my eyes on my shoes, and could not contrive to move with
ease or grace.
“The Marchesa del Dongo,” he added, “was then in the heyday of her
beauty. You know what she was, with her lovely eyes, angelic in their
gentleness, and the pretty, fair hair, which made so perfect a frame
for the oval of her charming face. In my room there was an Herodia, by
Leonardo da Vinci, which might have been her portrait. God willed that
her supernatural beauty should so overwhelm my senses as to make me
quite forget my own appearance. For two years I had been in the Genoese
mountains, looking at nothing but ugliness and misery. I ventured to say
a few words about my delight.
“But I had too much good sense to dally long with compliments. While I
was making mine, I perceived in a palatial marble dining hall some dozen
lackeys and men servants, dressed in what then appeared to me the height
of magnificence. Think of it! The rascals not only wore good shoes, but
silver buckles into the bargain! Out of the corner of my eye I could
see their stupid gaze riveted on my coat, and perhaps, too—and this
wrung my heart—upon my shoes. With one word I could have terrified the
whole set, but how was I to put them in their place without running the
risk of alarming the ladies? For to give herself a little courage, the
marchesa—she has told me so a hundred times over since—had sent to the
convent, where she was then at school, for her husband’s sister, Gina del
Dongo, who afterward became that charming Contessa Pietranera. No woman
was ever more gay and lovable in prosperity, and none ever surpassed her
in courage and serenity under Fortune’s frowns.
“Gina, who may then have been thirteen, but looked eighteen, frank and
lively, as you know, was so afraid of bursting out laughing at my dress
that she dared not even eat. The marchesa, on the contrary, overwhelmed
me with stiff civilities; she read my impatience and discomfort in my
eyes. In a word, I cut a sorry figure. I was chewing the cud of scorn,
which no Frenchman is supposed to be capable of doing. At last Heaven
sent me a brilliant notion. I began to tell the ladies about my poverty
and the misery we had suffered during those two years in the Genoese
mountains, where the folly of our old generals had kept us. ‘There,’ said
I, ‘they gave us _assignats_ which the people would not take in payment,
and three ounces of bread a day.’ Before I had been talking for two
minutes the kind marchesa’s eyes were full of tears and Gina had grown
quite serious. ‘What, lieutenant!’ she cried, ‘three ounces of bread?’
“‘Yes, mademoiselle. But, on the other hand, the supply failed three
times in the week, and as the peasants with whom we lived were even
poorer than ourselves, we used to give them a little of our bread.’
“When we rose from table I offered the marchesa my arm, escorted her as
far as the drawing-room door, then, hastily retracing my steps, presented
the servant who had waited upon me at dinner with the solitary coin on
the spending of which I had built such castles in the air.
“A week later,” Robert went on, “when it had become quite clear that the
French did not guillotine anybody, the Marchese del Dongo returned from
Grianta, his country house on Lake Como, where he had valiantly taken
refuge when the army drew near, leaving his young and lovely wife and
his sister to the chances of war. The marchese’s hatred of us was only
equalled by his dread. Both were immeasurable. It used to amuse me to see
his large, pale, hypocritical face when he was trying to be polite to me.
The day after his return to Milan I received three ells of cloth and two
hundred francs out of the six millions. I put on fresh plumage and became
the ladies cavalier, for ball giving began.”
Lieutenant Robert’s story was very much that of all the French soldiers.
Instead of laughing at the brave fellows’ poverty, people pitied them and
learned to love them. This period of unforeseen happiness and rapture
lasted only two short years. So excessive and so general was the frolic
that I can not possibly convey an idea of it, unless it be by means of
the following profound historic reflection: This nation had been bored
for a century!
The sensuality natural to southern countries had formerly reigned at the
courts of those famous Milanese dukes, the Sforza and the Visconti. But
since the year 1624, when the Spaniards had seized the province, and held
it under the proud, taciturn, distrustful sway of masters who suspected
revolt in every corner, merriment had fled away, and the populace, aping
its rulers’ habits, was much more prone to avenge the slightest insult
with a dagger thrust, than to enjoy the moment as it passed.
But between May 15, 1796, when the French entered Milan, and April,
1799, when they were driven out of the city by the battle of Cassano,
wild merriment, gaiety, voluptuous pleasure, and oblivion of every sad,
or even rational sentiment, reached such a pitch that old millionaire
merchants, usurers, and notaries were actually quoted by name as having
forgotten their morose and money-getting habits during that period. One
might have found a few families of the highest rank that had retired to
their country places to sulk at the general cheerfulness and universal
joy. And it is a fact, further, that these families had been honoured
with a disagreeable amount of attention by the authorities in charge of
the war tax, levied for the benefit of the French troops.
The Marchese del Dongo, disgusted at the sight of so much gaiety,
had been one of the first to return to his magnificent country seat
at Grianta, beyond Como, whither the ladies of his family conducted
Lieutenant Robert. This castle, standing in what is probably a unique
position, on a plateau some one hundred and fifty feet above the splendid
lake, and commanding a great portion of it, had once been a fortress.
It had been built, as the numerous marble slabs bearing the family arms
attested, during the fifteenth century. The drawbridges were still to
be seen, and the deep moats—now dry, to be sure. Still, with its walls
eighty feet high and six feet thick, the castle was safe from a _coup
de main_, and this fact endeared it to the suspicious marchese. Living
there, surrounded by five-and-twenty or thirty servants, whom he believed
to be devoted to him—apparently because he never spoke to them without
abusing them—he was less harried by fear than at Milan.
This alarm was not entirely unwarranted. The marchese was in active
correspondence with an Austrian spy stationed on the Swiss frontier,
three leagues from Grianta, to assist the escape of prisoners taken in
battle, and the French generals might have taken this exchange of notes
very seriously.
The marchese had left his young wife at Milan to manage the family
affairs. She it was who had to find means of supplying the contributions
levied on the Casa del Dongo, as it was locally called, and to endeavour
to get them reduced, which involved the necessity of her seeing
the noblemen who had accepted public positions, and even some very
influential persons who were not noble at all. A great event occurred in
the family. The marchese had arranged a marriage for his young sister
Gina with a gentleman of great wealth and the very highest descent.
But he powdered his head. Wherefore Gina received him with shrieks of
laughter, and shortly committed the folly of marrying Count Pietranera.
He, too, was a high-born gentleman, and very good-looking as well, but he
was ruined, as his father had been before him, and—crowning disgrace!—he
was an eager partisan of the modern ideas! The marchese’s despair was
completed by the fact that Pietranera was a lieutenant in the Italian
Legion.
After two years of extravagance and bliss, the Paris Directorate, which
took on all the airs of a well-established sovereignty, began to manifest
a mortal hatred of everything that rose above mediocrity. The incapable
generals sent to the Army of Italy lost a series of battles on those very
plains of Verona which but two years previously had witnessed the feats
of Arcola and Lonato. The Austrians approached Milan; Lieutenant Robert,
now a major, was wounded at the battle of Cassano, and came back for the
last time to the house of his friend the Marchesa del Dongo. It was a sad
farewell. Robert departed with Count Pietranera, who was following the
French retreat on Novi. The young countess, whose brother had refused to
give up her fortune, followed the retreating army in a cart.
Then began that period of reaction and return to the old ideas which the
Milanese call “_i tredici mesi_” (the thirteen months) because their
lucky star did not permit this relapse into imbecility to last beyond the
battle of Marengo. Everything that was old, bigoted, morose, and gloomy
came back to the head of affairs and of society. Before long, those who
had remained faithful to the old order were telling the villagers that
Napoleon had met the fate he so richly deserved, and had been hanged by
the Mamelukes in Egypt.
Among the men who had retired to sulk in their country houses, and
who now came back, thirsting for vengeance, the Marchese del Dongo
distinguished himself by his eagerness. His zeal naturally bore him
to the head of the party. The gentlemen composing it, very amiable
fellows when they were not in a fright, but who were still in a state of
trepidation, contrived to circumvent the Austrian general, who, though
rather of a kindly disposition, allowed himself to be persuaded that
severity was a mark of statesmanship, and ordered the arrest of a hundred
and fifty patriots. They were the best men Italy then possessed.
Soon they were all deported to the Bocche de Cattaro, and cast into
subterranean dungeons, where damp and, especially, starvation wreaked
prompt and thorough justice on the villains.
The Marchese del Dongo was appointed to an important post; and as the
meanest avarice accompanied his numerous other noble qualities, he
publicly boasted that he had not sent a single crown to his sister,
the Countess Pietranera. This lady, still fathoms deep in love, would
not forsake her husband, and was starving with him in France. The
kind-hearted marchesa was in despair. At last she contrived to abstract a
few small diamonds from her jewel-case, which her husband took from her
every night and locked up in an iron box under his bed. She had brought
him a dowry of eight hundred thousand francs, and he allowed her eighty
francs a month for her personal expenses. During the thirteen months of
the absence of the French from Milan, this woman, timid as she was, found
pretexts of one sort or another which enabled her always to dress in
black.
It must be confessed here that, after the example of many serious
authors, we have begun the story of our hero a year before his birth.
This important personage is no other, in fact, than Fabrizio Valserra,
Marchesino del Dongo, as he would be called at Milan.[1] He had just
condescended to come into the world when the French were driven out,
the chances of his birth making him the second son of that most noble
Marchese del Dongo, with whose large, pallid countenance, deceitful
smile, and boundless hatred of the new order of ideas, my readers are
already acquainted. The whole of the family fortune was entailed on the
eldest boy, Ascanio del Dongo, the perfect image of his father. He was
eight years old, and Fabrizio two, when, like a flash, that General
Bonaparte whom all well-born folk believed to have been hanged long
since, descended from Mount St. Bernard. He made his entry into Milan;
the event is still unique in history. Conceive a whole population over
head and ears in love! A few days later Napoleon won the battle of
Marengo. I need not tell the rest. The rapture of the Milanese overflowed
the cup. But this time it was mingled with thoughts of vengeance. A
good-natured folk had been taught to hate. Soon the remnant of the
patriots exiled to Cattaro reappeared, and their return was celebrated
by national festivities. Their pale faces, great startled eyes, and
emaciated limbs, contrasted strangely with the joy that reigned on
every side. Their arrival was the signal for the departure of the
families most concerned in their banishment. The Marchese del Dongo
was one of the first to flee to his house at Grianta. The heads of the
great families were filled with rage and terror, but their wives and
daughters, remembering the delights of the first French occupation,
sighed regretfully for Milan and the gay balls which, once Marengo was
over, were given at the Casa Tanzi. A few days after the victory the
French general charged with the duty of maintaining quiet in Lombardy
became aware that all the tenants of the noble families, and all the old
women in the country, far from dwelling on the wonderful victory which
had changed the fate of Italy, and reconquered thirteen fortresses in
one day, were thinking of nothing but the prophecy of San Giovità, the
chief patron saint of Brescia, according to which sacred pronouncement
the prosperity of Napoleon and of the French nation was to end just
thirteen weeks after Marengo. Some slight excuse for the Marchese del
Dongo and all the sulky country nobility is to be found in the fact that
they really and truly did believe in this prophecy. None of these people
had read four books in his life. They openly prepared to return to Milan
at the end of the thirteenth week, but as time went on, it was marked by
fresh successes on the French side. Napoleon, who had returned to Paris,
saved the revolution from within by his wise decrees, even as he had
saved it from foreign attack at Marengo. Then the Lombard nobles in their
country refuges discovered that they had misunderstood the prediction of
the patron saint of Brescia. He must have meant thirteen months instead
of thirteen weeks! But the thirteen months slipped by, and the prosperity
of France seemed to rise higher day by day.
We pass over the ten years of happiness and progress between 1800 and
1810. Fabrizio spent the earliest of them at Grianta, where he dealt
out many hard knocks among the little peasant boys, and received them
back with interest, but learned nothing—not even to read. Later he was
sent to the Jesuit school at Milan. The marchese, his father, insisted
that he should learn Latin, not out of those ancient authors who are
always holding forth about republics, but out of a splendid tome
enriched with more than a hundred and fifty engravings, a masterpiece of
seventeenth-century art, the Latin Genealogy of the Valserra, Marchesi
del Dongo, published by Fabrizio del Dongo, Archbishop of Parma, in the
year 1650. The Valserra were essentially a fighting race, and these
engravings represented numerous battles, in which some hero of the name
was always depicted as laying about mightily with his sword.
This book was a great delight to young Fabrizio. His mother, who adored
him, was allowed now and then to go to Milan to see him, but her husband
never offered to pay the cost of these journeys. The money was always
lent her by her sister-in-law, the charming Countess Pietranera, who,
after the return of the French, had become one of the most brilliant of
the ladies at the court of the Viceroy of Italy, Prince Eugène.
After Fabrizio had made his first communion, the countess persuaded
the marchese, who still lived in voluntary exile, to allow the boy to
pay her occasional visits. He struck her as being out of the common,
clever, very serious, but handsome, and no discredit to a fashionable
lady’s drawing-room—though he was utterly ignorant, and hardly knew how
to write. The countess, who carried her characteristic enthusiasm into
everything she did, promised her protection to the head of the Jesuit
house if only her nephew Fabrizio made astonishing progress in his
studies, and won several prizes at the close of the year. To put him in
the way of earning such rewards, she sent for him every Saturday night,
and frequently did not restore him to his teachers till the Wednesday
or Thursday following. Though the Jesuits were tenderly cherished by
the Viceroy, their presence in Italy was forbidden by the laws of the
kingdom, and the Superior of the college, a clever man, realized all
the benefits that might accrue from his relations with a lady who
was all-powerful at court. He was too wise to complain of Fabrizio’s
absences, and at the end of the year five first prizes were conferred on
the youth, who was more ignorant than ever. In the circumstances, the
brilliant Countess Pietranera, attended by her husband, then general in
command of one of the divisions of the Guard, and five or six of the most
important personages about the Viceroy’s court, attended the distribution
of prizes in the Jesuit school. The Superior received the congratulations
of the heads of his order.
The countess was in the habit of taking her nephew to all the gay fêtes
which enlivened the kindly Viceroy’s too short reign. She had made him
an officer of hussars, on her own authority, and the twelve-year-old
boy wore his uniform. One day the countess, delighted with his handsome
looks, asked the prince to make him a page, which would have been
tantamount, of course, to an acknowledgment of adherence to the new order
of things of the Del Dongo family. The next morning she was fain to use
all her influence to induce the Viceroy kindly to forget her request,
which lacked nothing but the consent of the father of the future page—a
consent which would have been loudly refused. As a result of this piece
of folly, which made him shiver, the sulky marchese coined some pretext
for recalling young Fabrizio to Grianta. The countess nursed a sovereign
contempt for her brother, whom she regarded as a dreary fool, who would
be spiteful if he ever had the power. But she doted on Fabrizio, and
after ten years of silence she wrote to the marchese, to beg that she
might have her nephew with her. Her letter remained unanswered.
When Fabrizio returned to the formidable pile built by the most warlike
of his ancestors he knew nothing about anything in the world except
drill, and riding on horseback. Count Pietranera, who had been as fond of
the child as his wife, had taught him to ride, and taken him with him on
parade.
When the boy reached Grianta, with eyes still reddened by the tears he
had shed on leaving his aunt’s splendid apartments, his only greeting was
that of his mother, who covered him with passionate caresses, and of his
sisters. The marchese was shut up in his study with his eldest son, the
Marchesino Ascanio. They were busy writing letters in cipher, which were
to have the honour of being sent to Vienna, and they were only visible
at mealtimes. The marchese ostentatiously declared that he was teaching
his natural successor to keep the accounts of the revenues of each of
his estates by double entry, but in reality he was far too jealous by
nature to mention such matters to the son on whom these properties were
absolutely entailed. He really employed him to translate into cipher
the despatches of fifteen or twenty pages which he sent, two or three
times a week, across the Swiss frontier, whence they were conveyed to
Vienna. The marchese claimed that he thus kept his legitimate sovereign
informed as to the internal conditions of the kingdom of Italy—a subject
about which he himself knew nothing at all. His letters, however, won
him great credit, and for the following reason: He was in the habit of
employing some trusty agent to count up the numbers of any French or
Italian regiment that marched along the high-road when changing its place
of garrison, and in making his report to Vienna he always carefully
diminished the number of men reported present by a full fourth. These
letters, then, ridiculous as they otherwise were, had the merit of
contradicting others of a more truthful nature, and thus gave pleasure
in high quarters. Consequently, not long before Fabrizio’s return to
Grianta, the marchese had received the star of a famous order—the fifth
that adorned his chamberlain’s coat. It is true, indeed, that he had to
endure the grief of never wearing the said coat outside the walls of
his own study, but, on the other hand, he never ventured to dictate any
despatch without first enduing his person with the richly embroidered
garment, hung with all his orders. Any other course would have seemed to
him a failure in respect.
The marchesa was delighted with her boy’s charms. But she had kept up the
habit of writing, twice or thrice in the year, to General Comte d’A⸺ (the
name then borne by Lieutenant Robert). She had a horror of lying to those
she loved; she questioned her son, and was startled by his ignorance.
“If,” she argued, “he appears ill-instructed to me, who know nothing,
Robert, who knows so much, would think his education an utter failure;
and nowadays some merit is indispensable to success!” Another
peculiarity, which almost equally astounded her, was that Fabrizio
had taken all the religious teaching given him by the Jesuits quite
seriously. Though herself a very pious woman, her child’s fanaticism
made her shiver. “If the marchese has the sense to suspect this means of
influencing my son, he will rob me of his love!” She wept many tears, and
her passionate love for Fabrizio deepened.
Life in the great country house, with its thirty or forty servants, was
very dull; and Fabrizio spent all his days hunting, or skimming over
the waters of the lake in a boat. He was soon the sworn ally of all the
coachmen and stable assistants—every one of them a vehement partisan of
the French—who made open sport of the highly religious valets attached
to the persons of the marchese and his elder son. The great joke against
these individuals was that, like their masters, they wore powder in their
hair.
[1] The habit of the country, borrowed from that of Germany, is that all
the sons of a marchese should be called _marchesino_. The son of a count
is known as _contino_; each of his daughters is a _contessina_.