About a year before the period of her misfortunes, the duchess had made
acquaintance with a strange being. One day, when, as they say in that
country, “_aveva la luna_,” she had betaken herself, quite unexpectedly,
toward evening, to her country house on the hill overlooking the Po, at
Sacca, beyond Colorno. She delighted in making improvements in the place;
she loved the huge forest that crowns the hill and grows close up to the
house. She was having paths cut through it to various picturesque spots.
“You’ll be carried off by brigands, fair lady,” said the prince to her
one day. “A forest where you are known to walk can not possibly remain
deserted.” The prince cast an eye on the count, whose jealousy he was
always trying to kindle.
“I have no fears, Most Serene Highness,” replied the duchess, with an air
of innocence. “When I walk about in my woods, I reassure myself with the
thought that I have never done any one any harm; therefore, who should
there be to hate me?” The remark struck the hearers as a bold one; it
recalled the insulting language employed by the Liberals of the country,
a most impudent set of people.
On the day of which we speak, the duchess was reminded of the prince’s
remark by the sight of a very poorly dressed man, who was following her,
at a distance, through the trees. In the course of her walk she made an
unexpected turn, which brought her so close to the stranger that she was
frightened. Her first impulse was to call to her gamekeeper, whom she
had left about a thousand paces off, in the flower-garden, close to the
house. But the stranger had time to approach her, and cast himself at her
feet. He was young, very handsome, miserably clad—there were rents a
foot long in his garments—but his eyes blazed with the fire of an ardent
soul.
“I am condemned to death; I am Dr. Ferrante Palla; I am starving, and so
are my five children.”
The duchess had noticed that he was frightfully thin, but his eyes were
so beautiful, and their expression at once so fervent and so tender,
that any idea of crime never occurred to her. “Pallagi,” thought she
to herself, “should have given such eyes to the St. John in the Desert
he has just placed in the cathedral.” The thought of St. John had been
suggested by Ferrante’s incredible thinness. The duchess gave him the
only three sequins she had in her purse, apologizing for the smallness
of the gift, on the score that she had just paid her gardener’s account.
Ferrante thanked her fervently. “Alas!” he said, “in old days I lived in
cities; I saw beautiful women. Since I have been condemned to death for
performing my duties as a citizen I have dwelt in the woods, and I was
following you, just now, not to rob you, nor to ask for alms, but, like
some savage, fascinated by a dainty beauty. It is long since I have seen
two fair white hands.”
“But pray rise,” said the duchess, for he was still kneeling.
“Let me stay where I am,” answered Ferrante. “The position makes me
realize I am not stealing at this moment, and that thought calms me.
For you must know that since I have been prevented from following my
profession, I have lived by theft. But at this moment I am only a humble
mortal adoring a sublime beauty.” The duchess realized that the man was
a little mad, but she was not frightened, she read the poor fellow’s
fervent and kindly soul in his eyes, and besides, she was not at all
averse to people of extraordinary appearance.
“I am a doctor, then, and I made love to the wife of Sarasine, the
apothecary at Parma. He discovered us, and drove her out, with three
children whom he suspected, and justly, to be mine, and not his own.
She has borne me two more since then. The mother and her five children
live in the deepest poverty about a league from here, in a sort of hut
in the wood, which I built with my own hands. For I must keep out of
the gendarmes’ way, and the poor woman will not be parted from me. I
was condemned to death, and very justly, too, for I was a conspirator;
I loathe the prince, who is a tyrant. I could not take to flight, for I
had no money. But my misfortunes have grown far greater now, and if I had
killed myself it would have been better for me, a thousand times. I have
no love, now, for the unhappy woman who has borne me these five children,
and sacrificed everything for me. I love another. But if I kill myself,
the five children and the mother must literally die of hunger.” There was
truth in the man’s voice.
“But how do you live?” exclaimed the duchess, greatly affected.
“The children’s mother spins; the eldest girl is fed by a farmer of
Liberal opinions, whose sheep she tends. As for me, I rob on the highway
between Piacenza and Genoa.”
“How can you reconcile robbery with your Liberal principles?”
“I keep note of the people whom I rob, and if ever I have anything of
my own, I will return the sums I have stolen from them. I reckon that
a tribune of the people, such as I, performs a work, considering its
danger, well worth a hundred francs a month, and I take care not to
steal more than twelve hundred francs a year. But I am mistaken; I steal
a little more than that, and the overplus enables me to pay for the
printing of my works.”
“What works?”
“Will the ⸺ ever have a chamber and a budget?”
“What!” cried the duchess in astonishment. “Then you, sir, are one of the
most famous poets of our century, the renowned Ferrante Palla!”
“Renowned, that may be; but most unhappy, that is sure.”
“And a man of such powers, sir, is forced to live by theft!”
“Perhaps that is the very reason why I have some talent. Up till now all
our best-known authors have been paid either by the government or by
the faith they were endeavouring to undermine. Now, in my case, first
of all, I carry my life in my hand, and secondly, consider, madam, the
thoughts that stir within me when I set out to rob! ‘Am I doing right?’
I say to myself. ‘Are my services as a tribune really worth a hundred
francs a month?’ I’ve two shirts, the coat you see upon me, some poor
weapons, and I shall certainly end by being hanged. I venture to think
I am disinterested. I should be happy, but for the fatal love which
prevents my finding anything but misery in the company of the mother of
my children. The ugliness of my poverty is what makes me suffer. I love
rich dresses, white hands”—and he began to look at the duchess’s hands in
a way that frightened her.
“Farewell, sir,” she said. “Can I serve you in any matter at Parma?”
“Give a thought, sometimes, to this question: His profession is to
stir men’s hearts, and prevent them from falling asleep in that false
and utterly material happiness which monarchies bestow. Is the service
he renders his fellow-citizens worth a hundred francs a month?—My
misfortune,” he added very gently, “is that I love. For nearly two years
you have filled all my soul, but until this day I had looked at you
without causing you any fear,” and he took to flight with a rapidity
so prodigious that it both astonished and reassured the duchess. “The
gendarmes would find it difficult to catch him,” she thought. “He
certainly is mad.”
“He is mad,” her servants told her. “We have all known for ever so long
that the poor man is desperately in love with the signora. When she is
here, we see him wandering about in the upper parts of the wood, and as
soon as she is gone he never fails to come down and sit wherever she has
stopped. He carefully picks up any flowers which may have fallen from her
nosegay, and carries them about for a long time, fastened to his shabby
hat.”
“And you never told me of these follies?” said the duchess, almost
reproachfully.
“We were afraid the Signora Duchessa might tell Count Mosca. Poor
Ferrante is such a good fellow, he never does any one any harm, and
because he loves our Napoleon, he has been condemned to death.”
Not a word did she say to the minister about this meeting, and as it was
the first secret she had kept from him for over four years, she found
herself stopped short in the middle of a sentence at least ten times
over. When she went back to Sacca she brought gold with her, but Ferrante
did not appear. A fortnight later she went again. Ferrante, after having
followed her for some time, bounding along in the wood about a hundred
paces from her, bore down upon her as swiftly as a sparrow-hawk and cast
himself at her knees, as on the first occasion.
“Where were you a fortnight ago?”
“In the mountains beyond Novi, robbing some muleteers on their way back
from Milan, where they had been selling oil.”
“Accept this purse.”
Ferrante opened the purse, took out a single sequin, which he kissed and
thrust into his bosom, and then gave the purse back to her.
“You give me back this purse—you, who are a robber!”
“No doubt about that. My rule is that I must never have more than a
hundred francs. Now, at this moment, the mother of my children has eighty
francs and I have twenty-five; I am out of my reckoning by five francs,
and if I were to be hanged at this moment I should be stung by remorse. I
have taken one sequin, because it comes from you, and I love you!”
The tone in which these simple words were spoken was perfect. “He really
does love!” thought the duchess to herself.
That day he seemed quite off his balance. He said there were some people
at Parma who owed him six hundred francs, and with that sum he would
repair his hut, in which his poor children were now constantly catching
cold.
“But I will advance the six hundred francs to you,” exclaimed the
duchess, greatly moved.
“But, then, would not my political opponents slander me, and say that I,
a public man, am selling myself?”
The duchess, deeply touched, offered to conceal him at Parma if he would
swear to her that for the moment he would not exercise his functions in
the town, and above all that he would not carry out any of the death
sentences which he declared he had _in petto_.
“And if I am hanged as the result of my imprudence,” said Ferrante
seriously, “all those wretches who do the people so much harm will live
for years and years, and whose fault will that be? What would my father
say to me when I meet him up yonder?”
The duchess talked to him a great deal about his little children, who
would very likely die of the damp. At last he accepted her offer of a
hiding-place in Parma.
During the one and only half-day which the Duke Sanseverina had spent at
Parma after his marriage, he had shown the duchess a very curious secret
chamber in the southern corner of the palace which bore his name. The
outer wall, which dates from the middle ages, is eight feet thick. It
has been hollowed out within, and a chamber has been thus formed, some
twenty feet high, and only two wide. Just beside it is that much-admired
“reservoir,” quoted by all travellers—a famous piece of twelfth-century
work, erected during the siege of Parma by the Emperor Sigismund,
and included, at a later period, within the inclosure of the Palazzo
Sanseverina.
To enter the hiding-place, a huge block of stone, set toward its centre
on an iron pivot, must be swung aside. So deeply touched was the duchess
by Ferrante’s condition of madness and the melancholy fate of his
children, for whom he obstinately refused to accept any gift of value,
that for some considerable time she allowed him to make use of this
chamber. About a month later she saw him again, still in the woods at
Sacca, and, being a trifle calmer on that occasion, he recited one of
his sonnets, which struck her as being equal, if not superior, to all
the finest things produced in Italy during the two previous centuries.
Ferrante was granted several interviews. But his passion grew more ardent
and importunate, and the duchess perceived that it was following the laws
of every love which is allowed the smallest opportunity for conceiving a
gleam of hope. She sent him back to his woods, and forbade him to speak
to her. He obeyed her instantly, with the most perfect gentleness.
Thus matters stood when Fabrizio was arrested. Three days afterward,
just at nightfall, a Capuchin friar knocked at the door of the Palazzo
Sanseverina. He had, he said, an important secret, which he desired to
communicate to the mistress of the mansion. She was so wretched that
she admitted him to her presence. It was Ferrante. “A fresh iniquity is
taking place here—one with which the tribune of the people must concern
himself. Moreover, as a private individual, all I have to give the
Duchess Sanseverina is my life, and that I offer her.”
This heartfelt devotion on the part of a thief and a madman touched the
duchess deeply. For a long time she conversed with this man, held to be
the greatest poet of northern Italy, and she shed many tears. “This man
understands my heart,” said she to herself. The next day, at the Ave
Maria, he reappeared, disguised as a liveried servant.
“I have not left Parma. I have heard a horrible thing which my lips shall
never repeat—but here I am. Consider, madam, what it is that you refuse!
The being you see before you is no court puppet, but a man.” He knelt
as he spoke the words, as though to increase their weight, and added:
“Yesterday I said to myself, ‘She wept in my presence, therefore she is a
thought less wretched!’”
“But, sir, think of the risks you are running. You will be arrested in
this city.”
“The tribune, madam, will reply, ‘What is life when duty calls?’ The
unhappy man whose penance it is that he feels no passion for virtue since
he has been consumed by love, will add: ‘Madam, Fabrizio, a brave-hearted
man, is perhaps about to perish. Do not drive away another brave man who
offers you his service. Here you have a frame of steel and a heart that
fears nothing in the world save your displeasure!’”
“If you mention your feelings to me again, I will close my doors to you
forever.”
It did occur to the duchess, that evening, to tell Ferrante she would
provide a small income for his children. But she was afraid he might go
out from her presence and destroy himself.
Hardly had he left her, when, haunted as she was by gloomy forebodings,
she began to muse. “I, too, may die—would to God it might be so, and
soon! If I could only find a man worthy of the name, to whom I might
confide my poor Fabrizio!”
An idea flashed across the duchess. She took a sheet of paper, and in a
document into which she introduced all the few law terms with which she
was acquainted, she acknowledged that she had received the sum of twenty
thousand francs from Signor Ferrante Palla, on the express condition that
she should pay a yearly pension of fifteen hundred francs to Signora
Sarasine and her five children. The duchess added: “I further leave a
yearly income of three hundred francs to each of her five children, on
condition that Ferrante Palla shall professionally attend my nephew
Fabrizio del Dongo, and be as a brother to him—I implore him to do this!”
She signed the paper, antedated it by a year, and put it away.
Two days later Ferrante reappeared. It was just at the moment when the
whole town was stirred by reports of Fabrizio’s approaching execution.
Was this gloomy ceremony to take place within the citadel, or under the
tree in the public square? Many men of the humbler classes walked up and
down in front of the citadel gates that evening, to try and see whether
the scaffold was being built. This sight had moved Ferrante. He found the
duchess dissolved in tears, and quite unable to speak. She greeted him
with her hand, and pointed him to a seat. Ferrante, who was disguised,
that day, as a Capuchin friar, behaved magnificently. Instead of seating
himself, he knelt down, and began to pray devoutly in an undertone.
Seizing a moment when the duchess was a little calmer, and without
changing his position, he broke off his prayer for an instant, with the
words: “Once again he offers his life.”
“Consider what you say,” exclaimed the duchess, and in her eye there
was that wild look which follows upon tears, and warns us that rage is
getting the better of emotion.
“He offers his life to place an obstacle in the way of Fabrizio’s fate,
or to avenge it.”
“There is a circumstance,” replied the duchess, “in which I might accept
the sacrifice of your life.”
She was looking at him, closely and sternly. A flash of joy shone in
his eyes; he rose swiftly to his feet and stretched out his arms toward
heaven. The duchess fetched a document hidden in a secret drawer in her
walnut-wood cabinet. “Read it,” said she to Ferrante. It was the gift in
his children’s favour, of which we have just spoken.
Tears and sobs prevented Ferrante from reading to the end; he fell on his
knees.
“Give me back that paper,” said the duchess, and she burned it at the
taper before his eyes.
“My name must not appear if you are taken and executed,” she added, “for
this matter affects your very life.”
“It is a joy to me to die by injuring the tyrant; it is a much greater
joy to die for you. Now that is said, and clearly understood, do me the
kindness not to speak of money again. It gives me a painful feeling that
you may doubt me.”
“If you are compromised I may be so too,” replied the duchess, “and
Fabrizio after me. For that reason, and not at all because I doubt
your courage, I insist that the man who will pierce my heart shall be
poisoned, and not stabbed. For the same reason, a most important one to
me, I command you to do everything in the world to save yourself.”
“I will perform all—faithfully, punctually, and prudently. I foresee,
madam, that my vengeance will be bound up with yours. Even if it were
otherwise, I would still obey—faithfully, punctually, and prudently. I
may not succeed, but I will strive with all the strength a man can use.”
“Fabrizio’s murderer must be poisoned.”
“I had guessed it; and during the seven-and-twenty months of this
wandering and hateful life of mine, I have often thought of committing
such an action on my own account.”
“If I am detected and condemned as your accomplice,” continued the
duchess, and there was pride in her voice, “I do not choose to have it
imputed to me that I have tempted you. I command you to make no attempt
to see me before the moment of our vengeance. There is to be no question
of his being put to death until I give you the signal. At this moment,
for instance, his death, far from being a service, would be a misfortune
to me. His death will probably not have to take place for several months,
but it will take place! I insist that he shall die by poison, and I would
rather let him live on than see him killed by a bullet. For reasons which
I do not choose to explain, I insist that your life shall be saved.”
The tone of authority the duchess used to him filled Ferrante with
delight. A mighty joy shone in his eyes. As we have said, he was
frightfully thin, but it was easy to see that he had been exceedingly
handsome in his early youth, and he fancied he still was what he had been
in former days. “Am I mad?” he thought, “or does the duchess intend, some
day, when I shall have given her this proof of my devotion, to make me
the happiest of all living men? And why not, after all? Am I not quite as
good as that puppet Mosca, who has not been able to do anything for her
in her need—not even to help Monsignore Fabrizio to escape?”
“I may desire his death even to-morrow,” continued the duchess, still in
the same authoritative tone. “You know that huge reservoir of water, at
the corner of the palace, close by the hiding-place you have occasionally
occupied? There are secret means whereby all that water can be turned
into the street. Well, that shall be the signal for my vengeance. If you
are at Parma you will see, if you are living in your woods you will hear,
that the great reservoir at the Sanseverina Palace has burst. Act then,
at once! But use poison, and, above all things, risk your own life as
little as may be. Let no one ever know that I have had a finger in the
matter.”
“Words are useless,” replied Ferrante, with ill-restrained enthusiasm. “I
have already decided on the means I shall employ. That man’s life becomes
more odious to me than before, since as long as he lives I shall not dare
to look on you again. I shall await the signal of the reservoir bursting
on to the street.” He bowed swiftly, and went out. The duchess watched
him go.
When he had reached the next apartment she called him back. “Ferrante,”
she cried, “noble fellow!”
He returned, as though impatient at being delayed; at that moment there
was something magnificent about his face.
“And your children?”
“Madam, they will be richer than I. You will perhaps grant them some
trifling income.”
“Here,” said the duchess, holding out a sort of large olive-wood case,
“here are all the diamonds I have left. They are worth fifty thousand
francs.”
“Ah, madam, you humiliate me,” exclaimed Ferrante, with a horrified
gesture, and his whole countenance changed.
“I shall never see you again before the thing is done. Take this, I
desire it,” added the duchess, with a haughty expression which crushed
Ferrante. He slipped the case into his pocket and retired.
He had closed the door behind him when the duchess called him back, and
he returned, wearing an anxious expression. The duchess was standing in
the middle of the drawing-room. She threw herself into his arms. After a
moment Ferrante almost fainted from sheer happiness. The duchess freed
herself from his embrace, and glanced meaningly at the door.
“This is the only man who has ever understood me,” said the duchess
to herself. “Fabrizio would have behaved like that if he could have
understood me.”
The duchess possessed two special characteristics. What she had desired
once she desired always, and she never deliberated a second time
concerning anything she had once decided. In this last connection she
would quote a remark made by her first husband, the kind-hearted General
Pietranera. “What an insolence to my own self! Why should I think I am
cleverer to-day than I was when I made the decision?”
From that moment a sort of cheerfulness reappeared in the duchess’s
temper. Before that fatal resolution was taken, at every step her mind
took, at every new point she noticed, she had felt her own inferiority
to the prince, her weakness, and the vile fashion in which she had been
tricked. The prince, as she held, had shamefully deceived her, and
Count Mosca, as the result of his courtier-like instinct, had, though
innocently, seconded the prince’s efforts. Once vengeance was decided on,
she felt her own strength, and every fresh working of her mind brought
her happiness. I am rather disposed to think that the immoral delight the
Italian nature finds in vengeance is connected with the strength of the
national imagination. The natives of other countries do not, strictly
speaking, forgive—they forget.
The duchess did not see Palla again till toward the end of Fabrizio’s
prison days. He it was, as my readers may perhaps have guessed, who
suggested the idea of the escape. In the woods, about two leagues from
Sacca, stood a half-ruined tower, dating from the middle ages, and over a
hundred feet high. Before mentioning the idea of flight a second time to
the duchess, Ferrante besought her to send Ludovico with some trusty men,
to set a succession of ladders against this tower. In the presence of the
duchess he climbed to the top by the ladders, and came down simply on a
knotted rope. Three times over he made the experiment, and then set forth
his notion again. A week afterward Ludovico also came down from the top
of the tower on a knotted rope. Then it was that the duchess suggested
the idea to Fabrizio.
During the last days before the attempt, which might possibly, and that
in more than one fashion, result in the prisoner’s death, the duchess
never knew an instant’s repose, except when Ferrante was with her. The
man’s courage stirred her own, but it will be easily understood that she
felt obliged to hide this strange connection from the count. She was not
afraid of his being horrified by it, but she would have been worried
by his objections, which would have doubled her own anxiety. “What!
choose an acknowledged madman, sentenced to death, to be her closest
counsellor!” “And,” the duchess would add, talking to herself, “a man
capable, in the future, of doing such strange things!” Ferrante was in
the duchess’s drawing-room when the count entered it to inform her of the
prince’s conversation with Rassi. She had much ado, after the count’s
departure, in preventing Ferrante from proceeding instantly to the
execution of his terrible project.
“I am strong now,” cried the crazy fellow. “I have no doubt at all as to
the legitimacy of my action.”
“But in the moment of rage which must inevitably follow, Fabrizio would
be put to death.”
“Well, then he would be spared the danger of his descent. It is possible,
it is even easy,” he added, “but the young man has had no practice.”
The marriage of the Marchese Crescenzi’s sister was duly celebrated,
and at the _fête_ given on that occasion, the duchess was able to meet
Clelia, and talk to her, without rousing the suspicions of well-bred
lookers-on. In the garden, whither the two ladies had betaken themselves
to get a moment’s breath of air, the duchess herself gave Clelia the
packet of ropes.
These ropes, most carefully made of hemp and wool mixed, and knotted,
were very slight, and fairly flexible. Ludovico had tested their
strength, and every yard of them would safely carry eight hundred-weight.
They had been compressed into several packets, exactly resembling quarto
volumes. Clelia took possession of them, and promised the duchess she
would do everything that was humanly possible to get them into the
Farnese Tower.
“But your natural timidity alarms me; and besides,” added the duchess
politely, “what interest can you feel in a man you do not know?”
“Monsignore del Dongo is unfortunate, and I promise you _that he shall be
saved by me_.”
But the duchess, who had no particular confidence in the presence of
mind of a young lady of twenty, had taken other precautions, which she
took care not to reveal to the governor’s daughter. As may naturally be
supposed, the said governor was present at the festivities in honour
of the marriage of the Marchese Crescenzi’s sister. The duchess said
to herself that if she could give him a strong narcotic, it might be
concluded, on the first blush, that he had been seized with a fit of
apoplexy, and then, instead of putting him into his carriage to take
him back to the citadel, she might, by dint of some little cunning,
contrive to have him carried in a litter, which should chance to be in
the house in which the guests were assembled. There, too, should be found
intelligent men, dressed as workmen employed about the festivities, who,
in the general confusion, should obligingly offer themselves to carry the
sick man up to his palace on the height. These men, headed by Ludovico,
carried a considerable quantity of rope, skilfully concealed about
their persons. It will be observed that since she had been seriously
considering the subject of Fabrizio’s flight, the duchess had quite lost
her head. The peril in which that beloved being stood was more than she
could bear, and above all, it had lasted too long. By the very excess of
her precautions, as we shall see, she almost brought about the failure
of his escape. Everything was carried out as she had planned, with this
single exception—that the effect of the narcotic was far too powerful.
Every one, even professional men, believed the general had an attack of
apoplexy.
Fortunately Clelia, in her despair, never for a moment suspected the
duchess’s criminal attempt. So great was the confusion, when the litter
in which the general lay half dead was borne into the citadel, that no
objection was made to the entrance of Ludovico and his men, and they were
only subjected to a purely formal search on the “Bridge of the Slave.”
When they had carried the general to his bed, they were taken to the
servants’ quarters, and hospitably entertained. But after the meal, which
did not end till toward morning, they were informed that according to
the rules of the prison, they must be locked up for the remainder of the
night in one of the lower rooms of the palace. After daylight the next
morning they would be set at liberty by the governor’s lieutenant.
The men had contrived to convey the ropes they had been carrying to
Ludovico. But Ludovico found great difficulty in attracting Clelia’s
attention for a moment. At last, as she was passing out of one room into
another, he made her see that he was laying the packets of rope in a
dark corner in one of the drawing-rooms on the first floor. Clelia was
profoundly impressed by this strange incident, and horrible suspicions at
once started up in her mind.
“Who are you?” said she to Ludovico, and when he gave her a very
ambiguous answer she added:
“I ought to have you arrested. Either you or those employing you have
poisoned my father.… Tell me, this instant, what poison you have used, so
that the doctor of the citadel may give him the proper remedies! Confess
instantly, or else neither you nor your accomplices shall ever leave this
citadel again.”
“The signora does wrong to be alarmed,” replied Ludovico, with the most
perfect grace and civility. “There is no question of poison at all. Some
one has imprudently given the general a dose of laudanum, and the servant
commissioned to commit this crime has apparently put a few drops too many
into the glass. This will cause us eternal remorse. But the signora may
rest assured that—thank Heaven for it!—there is no danger of any sort.
The governor must be treated for having taken an overdose of laudanum by
mistake. But I have the honour of assuring the signorina, once more, that
the footman employed about the crime used no real poisons, such as those
used by Barbone when he tried to make away with Monsignore Fabrizio.
There has been no attempt to avenge the danger run by Monsignore
Fabrizio; all the clumsy footman was given was a flask of laudanum. I
swear that to the signorina on my oath. But of course she understands
that if I were cross-questioned officially I should deny everything.
Besides, if the signorina were to speak to any one, even to the good Don
Cesare, either of laudanum or of poison, Fabrizio would be slain by the
signorina’s own hand. She would make any attempt at flight impossible,
and the signorina knows, better than I, that the people who desire to
poison Monsignore will not use laudanum only, and she knows, too, that a
certain person has only granted one month’s grace, and that more than one
week has already passed by since the fatal order was received. Therefore,
if she has me arrested, or if she even says a single word to Don Cesare,
or any other person, she will throw back all our undertakings for much
more than a month, and I speak the truth when I say that she will be
killing Monsignore Fabrizio with her own hand.”
Clelia was terrified by the strange calm with which Ludovico spoke.
“So here I am,” she thought, “in close conversation with a man who has
poisoned my father, and who addresses me with the utmost politeness; and
it is love which has led me into all these crimes!”
So great was her remorse that she had hardly strength to speak. She said
to Ludovico:
“I am going to lock you up in this room. I must run and tell the doctor
that the illness is caused by laudanum. But, great heavens! how am I
to tell him that I have found it out myself! Then I will come back
and release you. But,” said Clelia, hurrying back from the door, “did
Fabrizio know anything about this laudanum?”
“No, indeed, signorina. He never would have consented. And besides, what
was the good of confiding in an unnecessary person? We act with the
strictest caution; our object is to save Monsignore Fabrizio, who will
be poisoned within three weeks. The order has been given by a person
whose will meets, as a rule, with no obstacles. But if the signorina must
know all, it is believed that the duty has been confided to the terrible
Chief-Justice Rassi!”
Clelia fled in horror. She had such confidence in Don Cesare’s perfect
uprightness that she ventured to tell him, with a certain amount of
reticence, that the general had been given laudanum, and nothing more.
Without replying, without asking a question, Don Cesare hastened to the
doctor.
Clelia returned to the drawing-room into which she had locked Ludovico,
intending to ply him with questions concerning the laudanum. She did
not find him there; he had contrived to escape. Lying on a table, she
perceived a purse of sequins and a little box containing several sorts
of poisons. The sight of the poison made her shudder. “How can I be
sure,” she thought, “that nothing but laudanum has been administered to
my father, and that the duchess has not tried to avenge herself for the
attempt made by Barbone?
“Great God!” she exclaimed, “I am holding intercourse with my father’s
poisoners, and I have allowed them to escape. And perhaps, if that man
had been closely questioned, he would have confessed to something more
than laudanum.”
Bursting into tears, Clelia instantly fell upon her knees, and prayed
fervently to the Madonna.
Meanwhile the doctor of the citadel, greatly astonished by the
information conveyed to him by Don Cesare, according to which laudanum
was the cause of all the trouble, administered suitable remedies, which
soon removed the most alarming symptoms. At daybreak the general came
to his senses a little. His first act on returning to consciousness was
to pour volleys of abuse on the colonel, his second in command of the
citadel, who had ventured, while the general lay unconscious, to give a
few orders of the most simple description.
The governor then flew into a violent rage with a kitchen maid who had
brought him a bowl of broth, and who ventured to pronounce the word
“apoplexy.”
“Is a man of my age,” he exclaimed, “likely to have an apoplexy? Only my
bitterest enemies could possibly take pleasure in putting such a story
about. Besides, have I been bled, so as to give even slanderers a right
to talk about apoplexy?”
Fabrizio, deep in preparations for his own departure, could not conceive
the meaning of the strange noises that filled the citadel when the
governor was carried back to it half dead. At first he fancied his
sentence had been altered, and that he was about to be put to death.
Then, when nobody appeared in his room, he concluded that Clelia had
been betrayed, that the ropes which she had probably been conveying back
into the fortress had been taken from her, and that, in fact, all the
plans for his escape had been rendered impossible. At dawn the following
morning he saw an unknown man enter his room, and, without uttering a
word, set down a basket of fruit. Under the fruit was hidden a letter,
couched in the following terms:
“Filled with the bitterest remorse for what has been done—not, thank
Heaven, by my consent, but in consequence of an idea of mine—I have made
a vow to the Most Holy Virgin that if, by her blessed intercession, my
father’s life is saved, I will never again refuse to obey an order of
his. I shall marry the marchese as soon as he requires me to do it, and I
shall never see you again.
“Nevertheless, I believe it to be my duty to carry through that which
has been begun. On Sunday next, when you come back from mass, to which
you will be taken at my request—forget not to prepare your soul for
death; you may lose your life in your difficult undertaking—when you
come back from mass, I say, do all you can to delay the moment when you
re-enter your room. There you will find that which is indispensable for
your intended enterprise. If you perish it will break my heart! Will you
be able to accuse me of having had a hand in your death? Has not the
duchess herself told me, over and over again, that the Raversi faction
is winning the day? It is bent on binding the prince to it by an act of
cruelty which will separate him forever from Count Mosca. The duchess
has sworn to me, with tears, that no resource save this remains. If you
make no attempt you will certainly perish. I can not look at you again; I
have made my vow. But if, toward the evening on Sunday, you see me at the
usual window, dressed entirely in black, it will be a sign that on the
following night everything will be ready, as far as my feeble powers will
permit. After eleven o’clock—perhaps at midnight, or one in the morning—a
little lamp will stand in my window. That will be the decisive moment;
commend your soul to your patron saint, put on the priestly habit with
which you are provided, and depart.
“Farewell, Fabrizio! I shall be at my prayers, and shedding the bitterest
tears, you may be sure of that, while you are running these terrible
risks. If you perish I shall not survive you—great God, what have I said?
But if you succeed, I shall never see your face again. On Sunday, after
mass, you will find in your prison the money, the poisons, the ropes sent
you by that terrible woman who loves you so passionately, and who has
told me, three times over, that this thing must be done. May God and the
blessed Madonna preserve you!”
Fabio Conti was a jailer whose soul was always anxious, miserable,
wretched, constantly dreaming that some prisoner was escaping from his
clutches. He was loathed by every soul in the citadel. But misfortune
inspires all men with the same sentiments, and the unhappy prisoners,
even those chained up in dungeons three feet high and wide, and eight
feet long, in which they could neither stand nor sit upright—all the
prisoners, even these, I say, joined in having a Te Deum sung at their
expense, when they heard that the governor was out of danger. Two or
three of the poor wretches even wrote sonnets in honour of Fabio Conti.
Such is the effect of misery upon mankind. Let that man blame them whose
fate has condemned him to spend a year in a dungeon three feet high, with
eight ounces of bread a day, and fasting on Fridays!
Clelia, who never left her father’s room except to say her prayers in the
chapel, announced that the governor had decided that the rejoicings were
not to take place until the Sunday. On that Sunday morning, Fabrizio was
present at the mass and the Te Deum. In the evening there were fireworks,
and the soldiers in the lower halls of the castle received wine, four
times as much as the quantity authorized by the governor. Some unknown
person had even sent in several barrels of brandy, which the soldiers
broached. The soldiers who were drinking themselves drunk were too
good-natured to allow their five comrades, who were doing sentry duty
on the palace, to suffer from that fact. As fast as they reached their
sentry-boxes a trusty servant gave them wine. Further, some unknown hand
provided those on duty from midnight onward with a glass of brandy, and
(as was ultimately proved at the trial) at each glass the brandy bottle
was forgotten in the sentry-box.
The merry-making lasted longer than Clelia had expected, and it was not
till toward one o’clock that Fabrizio, who, more than a week previously,
had sawn through the bars of the window which did not look toward the
aviary, began to take down the wooden screen. He was working almost
over the heads of the sentries on the governor’s palace, but they heard
nothing. All he had done to the immensely long rope necessary for
carrying him down the terrible descent of a hundred and eighty feet was
to make a few fresh knots. He had slung this line over his shoulder; it
was very much in his way, on account of its bulk; the knots prevented it
from falling together, and it stood out more than eighteen inches from
his body. “This will be my great difficulty,” said Fabrizio to himself.
Having arranged this rope as best he could, Fabrizio took the length
which he intended should carry him down the thirty-five feet between
his window and the terrace on which the governor’s palace stood. But
seeing he could hardly, drunk though the sentinels were, come down on
the very tops of their heads, he got out, as we have already said, by
the second window of his room, which looked on to the roof of a sort of
huge guard-room. Some sick whim of General Fabio Conti’s had filled this
old guard-room, which had not been used for a century, with a couple
of hundred soldiers, whom he ordered up as soon as he could speak. He
declared that the people who had tried to poison him would murder him
in his bed, and that these two hundred soldiers must protect him. The
effect of this unexpected measure on Clelia’s feelings may be imagined.
The pious-hearted girl was very deeply conscious of the extent to which
she was deceiving her father, and a father who had just been very nearly
poisoned in the interests of the prisoner whom she loved. The unexpected
advent of these two hundred men almost struck her as a decree of
Providence, forbidding her to go forward, and restore Fabrizio to liberty.
But the prisoner’s approaching death was the universal topic of
conversation in Parma. Even at the festivities in honour of the marriage
of Signorina Julia Crescenzi, the melancholy subject had been discussed.
Since a man of Fabrizio’s birth, imprisoned for such a trifle as an
unlucky sword thrust given to an actor, was not set at liberty after
nine months’ detention, although he was favoured by the Prime Minister,
there must be something political about his story. That being so, it was
said, there was no use in thinking more about it. If it did not suit the
authorities to put him to death in the public square, he would soon die
of sickness.
A locksmith who had been sent for to do some work in General Fabio
Conti’s palace referred to Fabrizio as a prisoner who had been put to
death long since, and whose death was concealed for reasons of policy.
When Clelia heard that man speak, she made up her mind.