_PRISON_
The conversation continued until daybreak. This night was the one
hundred and seventy-third of his imprisonment, and he was informed that
for four months they had been making these signals every night. But
anyone might see and read them; they began from this night to establish
a system of abbreviations: three flashes in very quick succession meant
the Duchessa; four, the Prince; two, Conte Mosca; two quick flashes
followed by two slow ones meant _escape_. They agreed to use in future
the old alphabet _alla Monaca_, which, so as not to be understood by
unauthorised persons, changes the ordinary sequence of the letters, and
gives them arbitrary values: _A_, for instance, is represented by 10,
_B_ by Z; that is to say three successive interruptions of the flash
mean _B_, ten successive interruptions _A_, and so on; an interval of
darkness separates the words. An appointment was made for the following
night at one o'clock, and that night the Duchessa came to the tower,
which was a quarter of a league from the town. Her eyes filled with
tears as she saw the signals made by the Fabrizio whom she had so often
imagined dead. She told him herself, by flashes of the lamp: "_I love
you--courage--health--hope. Exercise your strength in your cell, you
will need the strength of your arms_.--I have not seen him," she said to
herself, "since that concert with Fausta, when he appeared at the door
of my drawing-room dressed as a _chasseur_. Who would have said then
what a fate was in store for him?"
The Duchessa had signals made which informed Fabrizio that presently he
would be released thanks to the Prince's bounty (these signals might be
intercepted); then she returned to messages of affection; she could not
tear herself from him. Only the representations made by Lodovico, who,
because he had been of use to Fabrizio, had become her factotum, could
prevail upon her, when day was already breaking, to discontinue signals
which might attract the attention of some ill-disposed person. This
announcement, several times repeated, of an approaching release, cast
Fabrizio into a profound sorrow. Clelia, noticing this next day, was so
imprudent as to inquire the cause of it.
"I can see myself on the point of giving the Duchessa serious grounds
for displeasure."
"And what can she require of you that you would refuse her?" exclaimed
Clelia, carried away by the most lively curiosity.
"She wishes me to leave this place," was his answer, "and that is what I
will never consent to do."
Clelia could not reply: she looked at him and burst into tears. If he
had been able to speak to her face to face, then perhaps he would have
received her avowal of feelings, his uncertainty as to which often
plunged him in a profound discouragement; he felt keenly that life
without Clelia's love could be for him only a succession of bitter
griefs or intolerable tedium. He felt that it was no longer worth his
while to live to rediscover those same pleasures that had seemed to him
interesting before he knew what love was, and, albeit suicide has not
yet become fashionable in Italy, he had thought of it as a last
resource, if fate were to part him from Clelia.
Next day he received a long letter from her:
"You must, my friend, be told the truth: over and over again, since you
have been here, it has been believed in Parma that your last day had
come. It is true that you were sentenced only to twelve years in a
fortress; but it is, unfortunately, impossible to doubt that an
all-powerful hatred is bent on your destruction, and a score of times I
have trembled for fear that poison was going to put an end to your days:
you must therefore seize every _possible_ means of escaping from here. You
see that for your sake I am neglecting the most sacred duties; judge of
the imminence of the danger by the things which I venture to say to you,
and which are so out of place on my lips. If it is absolutely necessary,
if there is no other way of safety, fly. Every moment that you spend in
this fortress may put your life in the greatest peril; bear in mind that
there is a party at court whom the prospect of crime has never deterred
from carrying out their designs. And do you not see all the plans of
that party constantly circumvented by the superior skill of Conte Mosca?
Very well, they have found a sure way of banishing him from Parma, it is
the Duchessa's desperation; and are they not only too sure of bringing
about the desperation by the death of a certain young prisoner? This
point alone, which is unanswerable, ought to make you form a judgment of
your situation. You say that you feel friendship for me: think, first of
all, that insurmountable obstacles must prevent that feeling from ever
becoming at all definite between us. We may have met in our youth, we
may each have held out a helping hand to the other in a time of trouble;
fate may have set me in this grim place that I might lighten your
suffering; but I should never cease to reproach myself if illusions,
which nothing justifies or will ever justify, led you not to seize every
possible opportunity of removing your life from so terrible a peril. I
have lost all peace of mind through the cruel folly I have committed in
exchanging with you certain signs of open friendship. If our childish
pastimes, with alphabets, led you to form illusions which are so little
warranted and which may be so fatal to yourself, it would be vain for me
to seek to justify myself by reminding you of Barbone's attempt. I
should be casting you myself into a far more terrible, far more certain
peril, when I thought only to protect you from a momentary danger; and
my imprudences are for ever unpardonable if they have given rise to
feelings which may lead you to resist the Duchessa's advice. See what
you oblige me to repeat to you: save yourself, I command you. . . ."
This letter was very long; certain passages, such as the _I command you_
which we have just quoted, gave moments of exquisite hope to Fabrizio's
love; it seemed to him that the sentiments underlying the words were
distinctly tender, if the expressions used were remarkably prudent. In
other instances he paid the penalty for his complete ignorance of this
kind of warfare; he saw only simple friendship, or even a very ordinary
humanity in this letter from Clelia.
Otherwise, nothing that she told him made him change his intentions for
an instant: supposing that the perils which she depicted were indeed
real, was it extravagant to purchase, with a few momentary dangers, the
happiness of seeing her every day? What sort of life would he lead when
he had fled once again to Bologna or to Florence? For, if he escaped
from the citadel, he certainly could not hope for permission to live in
Parma. And even so, when the Prince should change his mind sufficiently
to set him at liberty (which was so highly improbable since he,
Fabrizio, had become, for a powerful faction, one of the means of
overthrowing Conte Mosca), what sort of life would he lead in Parma,
separated from Clelia by all the hatred that divided the two parties?
Once or twice in a month, perhaps, chance would place them in the same
drawing-room; but even then, what sort of conversation could he hold
with her? How could he recapture that perfect intimacy which, every day
now, he enjoyed for several hours? What would be the conversation of the
drawing-room, compared with that which they made by alphabets? "And, if
I must purchase this life of enjoyment and this unique chance of
happiness with a few little dangers, where is the harm in that? And
would it not be a further happiness to find thus a feeble opportunity of
giving her a proof of my love?"
Fabrizio saw nothing in Clelia's letter but an excuse for asking her for
a meeting; it was the sole and constant object of all his desires. He
had spoken to her of it once only, and then for an instant, at the
moment of his entry into prison; and that was now more than two hundred
days ago.
An easy way of meeting Clelia offered itself: the excellent Priore Don
Cesare allowed Fabrizio half an hour's exercise on the terrace of the
Torre Farnese every Thursday, during the day; but on the other days of
the week this airing, which might be observed by all the inhabitants of
Parma and the neighbouring villages, and might seriously compromise the
governor, took place only at nightfall. To climb to the terrace of the
Torre Farnese there was no other stair but that of the little belfry
belonging to the chapel so lugubriously decorated in black and white
marble, which the reader may perhaps remember. Grillo escorted Fabrizio
to this chapel, and opened the little stair to the belfry for him: his
duty would have been to accompany him; but, as the evenings were growing
cold, the gaoler allowed him to go up by himself, locking him into this
belfry which communicated with the terrace, and went back to keep warm
in his cell. Very well; one evening, could not Clelia contrive to
appear, escorted by her maid, in the black marble chapel?
The whole of the long letter in which Fabrizio replied to Clelia's was
calculated to obtain this meeting. Otherwise, he confided to her, with
perfect sincerity, and as though he were writing of someone else, all
the reasons which made him decide not to leave the citadel.
"I would expose myself every day to the prospect of a thousand deaths to
have the happiness of speaking to you with the help of our alphabets,
which now never defeat us for a moment, and you wish me to be such a
fool as to exile myself in Parma, or perhaps at Bologna, or even at
Florence! You wish me to walk out of here so as to be farther from you!
Understand that any such effort is impossible for me; it would be
useless to give you my word, I could never keep it."
The result of this request for a meeting was an absence on the part of
Clelia which lasted for no fewer than five days; for five days she came
to the aviary only at times when she knew that Fabrizio could not make
use of the little opening cut in the screen. Fabrizio was in despair; he
concluded from this absence that, despite certain glances which had made
him conceive wild hopes, he had never inspired in Clelia any sentiments
other than those of a simple friendship. "In that case," he asked
himself, "what good is life to me? Let the Prince take it from me, he
will be welcome; another reason for not leaving the fortress." And it
was with a profound feeling of disgust that, every night, he replied to
the signals of the little lamp. The Duchessa thought him quite mad when
she read, on the record of the messages which Lodovico brought to her
every morning, these strange words: "_I do not wish to escape; I wish to
die here_!"
During these five days, so cruel for Fabrizio, Clelia was more unhappy
than he; she had had the idea, so poignant for a generous nature: "My
duty is to take refuge in a convent, far from the citadel; when Fabrizio
knows that I am no longer here, and I shall make Grillo and all the
gaolers tell him, then he will decide upon an attempt at escape." But to
go to a convent was to abandon for ever all hope of seeing Fabrizio
again; and how abandon that hope, when he was furnishing so clear a
proof that the sentiments which might at one time have attached him to
the Duchessa no longer existed? What more touching proof of love could a
young man give? After seven long months in prison, which had seriously
affected his health, he refused to regain his liberty. A fickle
creature, such as the talk of the courtiers had portrayed Fabrizio in
Clelia's eyes as being, would have sacrificed a score of mistresses
rather than remain another day in the citadel, and what would such a man
not have done to escape from a prison in which, at any moment, poison
might put an end to his life?
Clelia lacked courage; she made the signal mistake of not seeking refuge
in a convent, a course which would at the same time have furnished her
with a quite natural means of breaking with the Marchese Crescenzi. Once
this mistake was made, how was she to resist this young man--so lovable,
so natural, so tender--who was exposing his life to frightful perils to
gain the simple pleasure of looking at her from one window to another?
After five days of terrible struggles, interspersed with moments of
self-contempt, Clelia made up her mind to reply to the letter in which
Fabrizio begged for the pleasure of speaking to her in the black marble
chapel. To tell the truth, she refused, and in distinctly firm language;
but from that moment all peace of mind was lost for her; at every
instant her imagination portrayed to her Fabrizio succumbing to the
attack of the poisoner; she came six or eight times in a day to her
aviary, she felt the passionate need of assuring herself with her own
eyes that Fabrizio was alive.
"If he is still in the fortress," she told herself, "if he is exposed to
all the horrors which the Raversi faction are perhaps plotting against
him with the object of getting rid of Conte Mosca, it is solely because
I have had the cowardice not to fly to the convent! What excuse could he
have for remaining here once he was certain that I had gone for ever?"
This girl, at once so timid and so proud, brought herself to the point
of running the risk of a refusal on the part of the gaoler Grillo; what
was more, she exposed herself to all the comments which the man might
allow himself to make on the singularity of her conduct. She stooped to
the degree of humiliation involved in sending for him, and telling him
in a tremulous voice which betrayed her whole secret that within a few
days Fabrizio was going to obtain his freedom, that the Duchessa
Sanseverina, in the hope of this, was taking the most active measures,
that often it was necessary to have without a moment's delay the
prisoner's answer to certain proposals which might be made, and that she
wished him, Grillo, to allow Fabrizio to make an opening in the screen
which masked his window, so that she might communicate to him by signs
the instructions which she received several times daily from Signora
Sanseverina.
Grillo smiled and gave her an assurance of his respect and obedience.
Clelia felt a boundless gratitude to him because he said nothing; it was
evident that he knew quite well all that had been going on for the last
few months.
Scarcely had the gaoler left her presence when Clelia made the signal by
which she had arranged to call Fabrizio upon important occasions; she
confessed to him all that she had just been doing. "You wish to perish
by poison," she added: "I hope to have the courage, one of these days,
to leave my father and escape to some remote convent. I shall be
indebted to you for that; then I hope that you will no longer oppose the
plans that may be proposed to you for getting you away from here. So
long as you are in prison, I have frightful and unreasonable moments;
never in my life have I contributed to anyone's hurt, and I feel that I
am to be the cause of your death. Such an idea in the case of a complete
stranger would fill me with despair; judge of what I feel when I picture
to myself that a friend, whose unreasonableness gives me serious cause
for complaint, but whom, after all, I have been seeing every day for so
long, is at this very moment a victim to the pangs of death. At times I
feel the need to know from your own lips that you are alive.
"It was to escape from this frightful grief that I have just lowered
myself so far as to ask a favour of a subordinate who might have refused
it me, and may yet betray me. For that matter, I should perhaps be happy
were he to come and denounce me to my father; at once I should leave for
the convent, I should no longer be the most unwilling accomplice of your
cruel folly. But, believe me, this cannot go on for long, you will obey
the Duchessa's orders. Are you satisfied, cruel friend? It is I who am
begging you to betray my father. Call Grillo, and give him a present."
Fabrizio was so deeply in love, the simplest expression of Clelia's
wishes plunged him in such fear that even this strange communication
gave him no certainty that he was loved. He summoned Grillo, whom he
paid generously for his services in the past, and, as for the future,
told him that for every day on which he allowed him to make use of the
opening cut in the screen, he should receive a sequin. Grillo was
delighted with these terms.
"I am going to speak to you with my hand on my heart, Monsignore; will
you submit to eating your dinner cold every day? It is a very simple way
of avoiding poison. But I ask you to use the utmost discretion; a gaoler
has to see everything and know nothing," and so on. "Instead of one dog,
I shall have several, and you yourself will make them taste all the
dishes that you propose to eat; as for wine, I will give you my own, and
you will touch only the bottles from which I have drunk. But if Your
Excellency wishes to ruin me for ever, he has merely got to repeat these
details even to Signorina Clelia; women will always be women; if
to-morrow she quarrels with you, the day after, to have her revenge, she
will tell the whole story to her father, whose greatest joy would be to
find an excuse for having a gaoler hanged. After Barbone, he is perhaps
the wickedest creature in the fortress, and that is where the real
danger of your position lies; he knows how to handle poison, you may be
sure of that, and he would never forgive me this idea of having three or
four little dogs."
There was another serenade. This time Grillo answered all Fabrizio's
questions: he had indeed promised himself always to be prudent, and not
to betray Signorina Clelia, who according to him, while on the point of
marrying the Marchese Crescenzi, the richest man in the States of Parma,
was nevertheless making love, so far as the prison walls allowed, to the
charming Monsignore del Dongo. He had answered the latter's final
questions as to the serenade, when he was fool enough to add: "They
think that he will marry her soon." One may judge of the effect of this
simple statement on Fabrizio.
That night he replied to the signals of the lamp only to say that he was
ill. The following morning, at ten o'clock, Clelia having appeared in
the aviary, he asked her in a tone of ceremonious politeness which was
quite novel between them, why she had not told him frankly that she was
in love with the Marchese Crescenzi, and that she was on the point of
marrying him.
"Because there is not a word of truth in the story," replied Clelia with
impatience. It is true, however, that the rest of her answer was less
precise: Fabrizio pointed this out to her, and took advantage of it to
repeat his request for a meeting. Clelia, seeing a doubt cast on her
sincerity, granted his request almost at once, reminding him at the same
time that she was dishonouring herself for ever in Grillo's eyes. That
evening, when it was quite dark, she appeared, accompanied by her maid,
in the black marble chapel; she stopped in the middle, by the sanctuary
lamp; the maid and Grillo retired thirty paces towards the door. Clelia,
who was trembling all over, had prepared a fine speech: her object was
to make no compromising admission, but the logic of passion is
insistent; the profound interest which it feels in knowing the truth
does not allow it to keep up vain pretences, while at the same time the
extreme devotion that it feels to the object of its love takes from it
the fear of giving offence. Fabrizio was dazzled at first by Clelia's
beauty; for nearly eight months he had seen no one at such close range
except gaolers. But the name of the Marchese Crescenzi revived all his
fury, it increased when he saw quite clearly that Clelia was answering
him only with tactful circumspection; Clelia herself realised that she
was increasing his suspicions instead of dissipating them. This
sensation was too cruel for her to bear.
"Will you be really glad," she said to him with a sort of anger and with
tears in her eyes, "to have made me exceed all the bounds of what I owe
to myself? Until the third of August last year I had never felt anything
but aversion towards the men who sought to attract me. I had a boundless
and probably exaggerated contempt for the character of the courtier,
everyone who flourished at that court revolted me. I found, on the other
hand, singular qualities in a prisoner who, on the third of August, was
brought to this citadel. I felt, without noticing them at first, all the
torments of jealousy. The attractions of a charming woman, and one whom
I knew well, were like daggers thrust into my heart, because I believed,
and I am still inclined to believe that this prisoner was attached to
her. Presently the persecutions of the Marchese Crescenzi, who had
sought my hand, were redoubled; he is extremely rich, and we have no
fortune. I was rejecting them with the greatest boldness when my father
uttered the fatal word convent; I realised that, if I left the citadel,
I would no longer be able to watch over the life of the prisoner in
whose fate I was interested. The triumph of my precautions had been that
until that moment he had not the slightest suspicion of the appalling
dangers that were threatening his life. I had promised myself never to
betray either my father or my secret; but that woman of an admirable
activity, a superior intelligence, a terrible will, who is protecting
this prisoner, offered him, or so I suppose, means of escape: he
rejected them, and sought to persuade me that he was refusing to leave
the citadel in order not to be separated from me. Then I made a great
mistake, I fought with myself for five days; I ought at once to have
fled to the convent and to have left the fortress: that course offered
me a very simple method of breaking with the Marchese Crescenzi. I had
not the courage to leave the fortress, and I am a ruined girl: I have
attached myself to a fickle man: I know what his conduct was at Naples;
and what reason should I have to believe that his character has altered?
Shut up in a harsh prison, he has paid his court to the one woman he
could see; she has been a distraction from the dulness of his life. As
he could speak to her only with a certain amount of difficulty, this
amusement has assumed the false appearance of a passion. This prisoner,
having made a name for himself in the world by his courage, imagines
himself to be proving that his love is something more than a passing
fancy by exposing himself to considerable dangers in order to continue
to see the person whom he thinks that he loves. But as soon as he is in
a big town, surrounded once more by the seductions of society, he will
once more become what he has always been, a man of the world given to
dissipation, to gallantry; and his poor prison companion will end her
days in a convent, forgotten by this light-hearted creature, and with
the undying regret that she has made him an avowal."
This historic speech, of which we give only the principal points, was,
as one may imagine, interrupted a score of times by Fabrizio. He was
desperately in love; also he was perfectly convinced that he had never
loved before seeing Clelia, and that the destiny of his life was to live
for her alone.
The reader will no doubt imagine the fine speeches that he was making
when the maid warned her mistress that half past eleven had struck, and
that the General might return at any moment; the parting was cruel.
"I am seeing you perhaps for the last time," said Clelia to the
prisoner: "a proceeding which is evidently in the interest of the
Raversi cabal may furnish you with a cruel fashion of proving that you
are not inconstant." Clelia parted from Fabrizio choked by her sobs and
dying with shame at not being able to hide them entirely from her maid,
nor, what was worse, from the gaoler Grillo. A second conversation was
possible only when the General should announce his intention of spending
an evening in society: and as, since Fabrizio's imprisonment, and the
interest which it inspired in the curious courtiers, he had found it
prudent to afflict himself with an almost continuous attack of gout, his
excursions to the town, subjected to the requirements of an astute
policy, were decided upon often only at the moment of his getting into
the carriage.
After this evening in the marble chapel, Fabrizio's life was a
succession of transports of joy. Serious obstacles, it was true, seemed
still to stand in the way of his happiness; but now at last he had that
supreme and scarcely hoped-for joy of being loved by the divine creature
who occupied all his thoughts.
On the third evening after this conversation, the signals from the lamp
finished quite early, almost at midnight; at the moment of their coming
to an end Fabrizio almost had his skull broken by a huge ball of lead
which, thrown over the top of the screen of his window, came crashing
through its paper panes and fell into his room.
This huge ball was not nearly so heavy as appeared from its size.
Fabrizio easily succeeded in opening it, and found inside a letter from
the Duchessa. By the intervention of the Archbishop, to whom she paid
sedulous attention, she had won over to her side a soldier in the
garrison of the citadel. This man, a skilled slinger, had eluded the
sentries posted at the corners and outside the door of the governor's
_palazzo_, or had come to terms with them.
"You must escape with cords: I shudder as I give you this strange
advice, I have been hesitating, for two whole months and more, to tell
you this; but the official outlook grows darker every day, and one must
be prepared for the worst. This being so, start signalling again at once
with your lamp, to shew us that you have received this letter; send
_P--B--G alla Monaca_, that is four, three and two: I shall not breathe
until I have seen this signal. I am on the tower, we shall answer
_N--O_, that is seven and five. On receiving the answer send no other
signal, and attend to nothing but the meaning of my letter."
Fabrizio made haste to obey and sent the arranged signals, which were
followed by the promised reply; then he went on reading the letter:
"We may be prepared for the worst; so I have been told by the three men
in whom I have the greatest confidence, after I had made them swear on
the Gospel that they would tell me the truth, however cruel it might be
to me. The first of these men threatened the surgeon who betrayed you at
Ferrara that he would fall upon him with an open knife in his hand; the
second told you, on your return from Belgirate, that it would have been
more strictly prudent to take your pistol and shoot the footman who came
singing through the wood leading a fine horse, but a trifle thin; you do
not know the third: he is a highway robber of my acquaintance, a man of
action if ever there was one, and as full of courage as yourself; that
is chiefly why I asked him to tell me what you ought to do. All three of
them assured me, without knowing, any of them, that I was consulting the
other two, that it was better to risk breaking your neck than to spend
eleven years and four months in the continual fear of a highly probable
poison.
"You must for the next month practise in your cell climbing up and down
on a knotted cord. Then, on the night of some _festa_ when the garrison
of the citadel will have received an extra ration of wine, you will make
the great attempt; you shall have three cords of silk and canvas, of the
thickness of a swan's quill, the first of eighty feet to come down the
thirty-five feet from the window to the orange trees; the second of
three hundred feet, and that is where the difficulty will be on account
of the weight, to come down the hundred and eighty feet which is the
height of the wall of the great tower; a third of thirty feet will help
you to climb down the rampart. I spend my life studying the great wall
from the east, that is from the direction of Ferrara: a gap due to an
earthquake has been filled by means of a buttress which forms an
_inclined plane_. My highway robber assures me that he would undertake
to climb down on that side without any great difficulty and at the risk
only of a few scratches, by letting himself slide along the inclined
plane formed by this buttress. The vertical drop is no more than
twenty-eight feet, right at the bottom: that side is the least carefully
guarded.
"However, all things considered, my robber, who has escaped three times
from prison, and whom you would love if you knew him, though he
abominates people of your class; my highway robber, I say, as agile and
nimble as yourself, thinks that he would rather come down on the west
side, exactly opposite the little _palazzo_ formerly occupied by Fausta,
which you know well. What would make him choose that side is that the
wall, although very slightly inclined, is covered almost all the way
down with shrubs; there are twigs on it, as thick as your little finger,
which may easily scratch you if you do not take care, but are also
excellent things to hold on to. Only this morning I examined this west
side with an excellent telescope: the place to choose is precisely
beneath a new stone which was fixed in the parapet two or three years
ago. Directly beneath this stone you will find first of all a bare space
of some twenty feet; you must go very slowly down this (you can imagine
how my heart shudders in giving you these terrible instructions, but
courage consists in knowing how to choose the lesser evil, frightful as
it may be); after the bare space, you will find eighty or ninety feet of
quite big shrubs, out of which one can see birds flying, then a space of
thirty feet where there is nothing but grass, wall-flowers and creepers.
Then, as you come near the ground, twenty feet of shrubs, and last of
all twenty-five or thirty feet recently plastered.
"What would make me choose this side is that there, directly underneath
the new stone in the parapet on top, there is a wooden hut built by a
soldier in his garden, which the engineer captain employed at the
fortress is trying to force him to pull down; it is seventeen feet high,
and is roofed with thatch, and the roof touches the great wall of the
citadel. It is this roof that tempts me; in the dreadful event of an
accident, it would break your fall. Once you have reached this point,
you are within the circle of the ramparts, which are none too carefully
guarded; if they arrest you there, fire your pistol and put up a fight
for a few minutes. Your friend of Ferrara and another stout-hearted man,
he whom I call the highway robber, will have ladders, and will not
hesitate to scale this quite low rampart, and fly to your rescue.
"The rampart is only twenty-three feet high, and is built on an easy
slope. I shall be at the foot of this last wall with a good number of
armed men.
"I hope to be able to send you five or six letters by the same channel
as this. I shall continue to repeat the same things in different words,
so that we may fully understand one another. You can guess with what
feelings I tell you that the man who said: '_Shoot the footman_,' who,
after all, is the best of men, and is dying of compunction, thinks that
you will get away with a broken arm. The highway robber, who has a wider
experience of this sort of expedition, thinks that, if you will climb
down very carefully, and, above all, without hurrying, your liberty need
cost you only a few scratches. The great difficulty is to supply the
cords; and this is what has been occupying my whole mind during the last
fortnight, in which this great idea has taken up all my time.
"I make no answer to that mad signal, the only stupid thing you have
ever said in your life: 'I do not wish to escape!' The man who said:
'Shoot the footman,' exclaimed that boredom had driven you mad. I shall
not attempt to hide from you that we fear a very imminent danger, which
will perhaps hasten the day of your flight. To warn you of this danger,
the lamp will signal several times in succession:
_The castle has taken fire._
You will reply:
_Are my books burned?_"
_THE JUDGES_
This letter contained five or six pages more of details; it was written
in a microscopic hand on the thinnest paper.
"All that is very fine and very well thought out," Fabrizio said to
himself; "I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to the Conte and the
Duchessa; they will think perhaps that I am afraid, but I shall not try
to escape. Did anyone ever escape from a place where he was at the
height of happiness, to go and cast himself into a horrible exile where
everything would be lacking, including air to breathe? What should I do
after a month at Florence? I should put on a disguise to come and prowl
round the gate of this fortress, and try to intercept a glance!"
Next day Fabrizio had an alarm; he was at his window, about eleven
o'clock, admiring the magnificent view and awaiting the happy moment
when he should see Clelia, when Grillo came breathless into his cell:
"Quick, quick, Monsignore! Fling yourself on your bed, pretend to be
ill; there are three judges coming up! They are going to question you:
think well before you speak; they have come to _entangle_ you."
So saying, Grillo made haste to shut the little trap in the screen,
thrust Fabrizio on to his bed and piled two or three cloaks on top of
him.
"Tell them that you are very ill, and don't say much; above all make
them repeat their questions, so as to have time to think."
The three judges entered. "Three escaped gaolbirds," thought Fabrizio on
seeing their vile faces, "not three judges." They wore long black gowns.
They bowed gravely and took possession, without saying a word, of the
three chairs that were in the room.
"Signor Fabrizio del Dongo," said the eldest of the three, "we are
pained by the sad duty which we have come to you to perform. We are here
to announce to you the decease of His Excellency the Signor Marchese del
Dongo, your father, Second Grand Majordomo Major of the
Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, Knight Grand Cross of the Orders of ----" a
string of titles followed. Fabrizio burst into tears. The judge went on:
"The Signora Marchesa del Dongo, your mother, informs you of this event
by a letter missive; but as she has added to the fact certain improper
reflexions, by a decree issued yesterday, the Court of Justice has
decided that her letter shall be communicated to you only by extract,
and it is this extract which the Recorder Bona is now going to read to
you."
_PRISON_
This reading finished, the judge came across to Fabrizio, who was still
lying down, and made him follow on his mother's letter the passages of
which copies had been read to him. Fabrizio saw in the letter the words
_unjust imprisonment_, _cruel punishment for a crime which is no crime
at all_, and understood what had inspired the judges' visit. However, in
his contempt for magistrates without honour, he did not actually say to
them any more than:
"I am ill, gentlemen, I am dying of weakness, and you will excuse me if
I do not rise."
When the judges had gone, Fabrizio wept again copiously, then said to
himself: "Am I a hypocrite? I used to think that I did not love him at
all."
On that day and the days that followed Clelia was very sad; she called
him several times, but had barely the courage to say a few words. On the
morning of the fifth day after their first meeting, she told him that
she would come that evening to the marble chapel.
"I can only say a few words to you," she told him as she entered. She
trembled so much that she had to lean on her maid. After sending the
woman to wait at the chapel door: "You are going to give me your word of
honour," she went on in a voice that was barely audible, "you are going
to give me your word of honour that you will obey the Duchessa, and will
attempt to escape on the day when she orders you and in the way that she
will indicate to you, or else to-morrow morning I fly to a convent, and
I swear to you here and now that never in my life will I utter a word to
you again."
Fabrizio remained silent.
"Promise," said Clelia, the tears starting to her eyes and apparently
quite beside herself, "or else we converse here for the last time. The
life you have made me lead is intolerable: you are here on my account,
and each day is perhaps the last of your existence." At this stage
Clelia became so weak that she was obliged to seek the support of an
enormous armchair that had originally stood in the middle of the chapel,
for the use of the prisoner-prince; she was almost fainting.
"What must I promise?" asked Fabrizio with a beaten air.
"You know."
"I swear then to cast myself deliberately into a terrible disaster, and
to condemn myself to live far from all that I love in the world."
"Make a definite promise."
"I swear to obey the Duchessa and to make my escape on the day she
wishes and as she wishes. And what is to become of me once I am parted
from you?"
"Swear to escape, whatever may happen to you."
"What! Have you made up your mind to marry the Marchese Crescenzi as
soon as I am no longer here?"
"Oh, heavens! What sort of heart do you think I have? . . . But swear,
or I shall not have another moment's peace."
"Very well, I swear to escape from here on the day on which Signora
Sanseverina shall order me to do so, and whatever may happen to me
between now and then."
This oath obtained, Clelia became so faint that she was obliged to
retire after thanking Fabrizio.
"Everything was in readiness for my flight to-morrow morning," she told
him, "had you persisted in refusing. I should have beheld you at this
moment for the last time in my life, I had vowed that to the Madonna.
Now, as soon as I can leave my room, I shall go and examine the terrible
wall beneath the new stone in the parapet."
On the following day he found her so pale that he was keenly distressed.
She said to him from the aviary window:
"Let us be under no illusion, my dear friend; as there is sin in our
friendship, I have no doubt that misfortune will come to us. You will be
discovered while seeking to make your escape, and ruined for ever, if it
is no worse; however, we must satisfy the demands of human prudence, it
orders us to leave nothing untried. You will need, to climb down the
outside of the great tower, a strong cord more than two hundred feet
long. In spite of all the efforts I have made since I learned of the
Duchessa's plan, I have only been able to procure cords that together
amount to barely fifty feet. By a standing order of the governor, all
cords that may be seen in the fortress are burned, and every evening
they remove the well-ropes, which for that matter are so frail that they
often break when drawing up the light weight attached to them. But pray
God to forgive me, I am betraying my father, and working, unnatural girl
that I am, to cause him undying grief. Pray to God for me, and, if your
life is saved, make a vow to consecrate every moment of it to His Glory.
"This is an idea that has come to me: in a week from now I shall leave
the citadel to be present at the wedding of one of the Marchese
Crescenzi's sisters. I shall come back that night, as I must, but I
shall try in every possible way not to come in until very late, and
perhaps Barbone will not dare to examine me too closely. All the
greatest ladies of the court will be at this wedding of the Marchese's
sister, and no doubt Signora Sanseverina among them. In heaven's name,
make one of these ladies give me a parcel of cords tightly packed, not
too large, and reduced to the smallest possible bulk. Were I to expose
myself to a thousand deaths I shall employ every means, even the most
dangerous, to introduce this parcel of cords into the citadel, in
defiance, alas, of all my duties. If my father comes to hear of it, I
shall never see you again; but whatever may be the fate that is in store
for me, I shall be happy within the bounds of a sisterly friendship if I
can help to save you."
That same evening, by their nocturnal correspondence with the lamps,
Fabrizio gave the Duchessa warning of the unique opportunity that would
shortly arise of conveying into the citadel a sufficient length of cord.
But he begged her to keep this secret even from the Conte, which seemed
to her odd. "He is mad," thought the Duchessa, "prison has altered him,
he is taking things in a tragic spirit." Next day a ball of lead, thrown
by the slinger, brought the prisoner news of the greatest possible
peril; the person who undertook to convey the cords, he was told, would
be literally saving his life. Fabrizio hastened to give this news to
Clelia. This leaden ball brought him also a very careful drawing of the
western wall by which he was to climb down from the top of the great
tower into the space enclosed within the bastions; from this point it
was then quite easy to escape, the ramparts being, as we know, only
twenty-three feet in height. On the back of the plan was written in an
exquisite hand a magnificent sonnet: a generous soul exhorted Fabrizio
to take flight, and not to allow his soul to be debased and his body
destroyed by the eleven years of captivity which he had still to
undergo.
At this point a detail which is essential and will explain in part the
courage that the Duchessa had found to recommend to Fabrizio so
dangerous a flight, obliges us to interrupt for a moment the history of
this bold enterprise.
Like all parties which are not in power, the Raversi party was not
closely united. Cavaliere Riscara detested the Fiscal Rassi, whom he
accused of having made him lose an important suit in which, as a matter
of fact, he, Riscara, had been in the wrong. From Riscara the Prince
received an anonymous message informing him that a copy of Fabrizio's
sentence had been officially addressed to the governor of the citadel.
The Marchesa Raversi, that skilled party leader, was extremely annoyed
by this false move, and at once sent word of it to her friend the Fiscal
General; she found it quite natural that he should have wished to secure
something from the Minister Mosca while Mosca remained in power. Rassi
presented himself boldly at the Palace, thinking that he would get out
of the scrape with a few kicks; the Prince could not dispense with a
talented jurist, and Rassi had procured the banishment as Liberals of a
judge and a barrister, the only two men in the country who could have
taken his place.
_AN AUDIENCE_
The Prince, beside himself with rage, hurled insults at him and advanced
upon him to strike him.
"Why, it is only a clerk's mistake," replied Rassi with the utmost
coolness; "the procedure is laid down by the law, it should have been
done the day after Signor del Dongo was confined in the citadel. The
clerk in his zeal thought it had been forgotten, and must have made me
sign the covering letter as a formality."
"And you expect to take me in with a clumsy lie like that?" cried the
Prince in a fury; "why not confess that you have sold yourself to that
rascal Mosca, and that this is why he gave you the Cross. But, by
heaven, you shall not escape with a thrashing: I shall have you brought
to justice, I shall disgrace you publicly."
"I defy you to bring me to justice," replied Rassi with assurance; he
knew that this was a sure way of calming the Prince: "the law is on my
side, and you have not a second Rassi to find you a way round it. You
will not disgrace me, because there are moments when your nature is
severe; you then feel a thirst for blood, but at the same time you seek
to retain the esteem of reasonable Italians; that esteem is a _sine qua
non_ for your ambition. And so you will recall me for the first act of
severity of which your nature makes you feel the need, and as usual I
shall procure you a quite regular sentence passed by timid judges who
are fairly honest men, which will satisfy your passions. Find another
man in your States as useful as myself!"
So saying, Rassi fled; he had got out of his scrape with a sharp
reprimand and half-a-dozen kicks. On leaving the Palace he started for
his estate of Riva; he had some fear of a dagger-thrust in the first
impulse of anger, but had no doubt that within a fortnight a courier
would summon him back to the capital. He employed the time which he
spent in the country in organising a safe method of correspondence with
Conte Mosca; he was madly in love with the title of Barone, and felt
that the Prince made too much of that sublime thing, nobility, ever to
confer it upon him; whereas the Conte, extremely proud of his own birth,
respected nothing but nobility proved by titles anterior by the year
1400.
The Fiscal General had not been out in his forecast: he had been barely
eight days on his estate when a friend of the Prince, who came there by
chance, advised him to return to Parma without delay; the Prince
received him with a laugh, then assumed a highly serious air, and made
him swear on the Gospel that he would keep secret what was going to be
confided to him. Rassi swore with great solemnity, and the Prince, his
eye inflamed by hatred, cried that he would no longer be master in his
own house so long as Fabrizio del Dongo was alive.
"I cannot," he went on, "either drive the Duchessa away or endure her
presence; her eyes defy me and destroy my life."
Having allowed the Prince to explain himself at great length, Rassi,
affecting extreme embarrassment, finally exclaimed:
"Your Highness shall be obeyed, of course, but the matter is one of a
horrible difficulty: there is no possibility of condemning a del Dongo
to death for the murder of a Giletti; it is already a masterly stroke to
have made twelve years' imprisonment out of it. Besides, I suspect the
Duchessa of having discovered three of the _contadini_ who were employed
on the excavations at Sanguigna, and were outside the trench at the
moment when that brigand Giletti attacked del Dongo.
"And where are these witnesses?" said the Prince, irritated.
"Hiding in Piedmont, I suppose. It would require a conspiracy against
Your Highness's life. . . ."
"There is a danger in that," said the Prince, "it makes people think of
the reality."
"Well," said Rassi with a feint of innocence, "that is all my official
arsenal."
"There remains poison. . . ."
"But who is to give it? Not that imbecile Conte?"
"From what one hears, it would not be his first attempt. . . ."
"He would have to be roused to anger first," Rassi went on; "and
besides, when he made away with the captain he was not thirty, and he
was in love, and infinitely less of a coward than he is in these days.
No doubt, everything must give way to reasons of State; but, taken
unawares like this and at first sight, I can see no one to carry out the
Sovereign's orders but a certain Barbone, registry clerk in the prison,
whom Signor del Dongo knocked down with a cuff in the face on the day of
his admission there."
Once the Prince had been put at his ease, the conversation was endless;
he brought it to a close by granting his Fiscal General a month in which
to act; Rassi wished for two. Next day he received a secret present of a
thousand sequins. For three days he reflected; on the fourth he returned
to his original conclusion, which seemed to him self-evident: "Conte
Mosca alone will have the heart to keep his word to me, because, in
making me a Barone, he does not give me anything that he respects;
secondly, by warning him, I save myself probably from a crime for which
I am more or less paid in advance; thirdly, I have my revenge for the
first humiliating blows which Cavaliere Rassi has received." The
following night he communicated to Conte Mosca the whole of his
conversation with the Prince.
The Conte was secretly paying his court to the Duchessa; it is quite
true that he still did not see her in her own house more than once or
twice in a month, but almost every week, and whenever he managed to
create an occasion for speaking of Fabrizio, the Duchessa, accompanied
by Cecchina, would come, late in the evening, to spend a few moments in
the Conte's gardens. She managed even to deceive her coachman, who was
devoted to her, and believed her to be visiting a neighbouring house.
One may imagine whether the Conte, after receiving the Fiscal's terrible
confidence, at once made the signal arranged between them to the
Duchessa. Although it was the middle of the night, she begged him by
Cecchina to come to her for a moment. The Conte, enraptured, lover-like,
by this prospect of intimate converse, yet hesitated before telling the
Duchessa everything. He was afraid of seeing her driven mad by grief.
After first seeking veiled words in which to mitigate the fatal
announcement, he ended by telling her all; it was not in his power to
keep a secret which she asked of him. In the last nine months her
extreme misery had had a great influence on this ardent soul, this had
fortified her courage, and she did not give way to sobs or lamentations.
On the following evening she sent Fabrizio the signal of great danger:
"_The castle has taken fire._"
He made the appropriate reply:
"_Are my books burned?_"
The same night she was fortunate enough to have a letter conveyed to him
in a leaden ball. It was a week after this that the marriage of the
Marchese Crescenzi's sister was celebrated, when the Duchessa was guilty
of an enormously rash action of which we shall give an account in its
proper place.