The only moments in which Fabrizio had any chance of escaping from his
profound melancholy were those which he spent hidden behind a pane, the
glass of which he had had replaced by a sheet of oiled paper, in the
window of his apartment opposite the _palazzo_ Contarini, in which, as
we know, Clelia had taken refuge; on the few occasions on which he had
seen her since his leaving the citadel, he had been profoundly
distressed by a striking change, and one that seemed to him of the most
evil augury. Since her fall, Clelia's face had assumed a character of
nobility and seriousness that was truly remarkable; one would have
called her a woman of thirty. In this extraordinary change, Fabrizio
caught the reflexion of some firm resolution. "At every moment of the
day," he said to himself, "she is swearing to herself to be faithful to
the vow she made to the Madonna, and never to see me again."
Fabrizio guessed a part only of Clelia's miseries; she knew that her
father, having fallen into deep disgrace, could not return to Parma and
reappear at court (without which life for him was impossible) until the
day of her marriage to the Marchese Crescenzi; she wrote to her father
that she desired this marriage. The General had then retired to Turin,
where he was ill with grief. Truly, the counter-effect of that desperate
remedy had been to add ten years to her age.
_THE PALAZZO CONTARINI_
She had soon discovered that Fabrizio had a window opposite the
_palazzo_ Contarini; but only once had she had the misfortune to behold
him; as soon as she saw the poise of a head or a man's figure that in
any way resembled his, she at once shut her eyes. Her profound piety and
her confidence in the help of the Madonna were from then onwards her
sole resources. She had the grief of feeling no respect for her father;
the character of her future husband seemed to her perfectly lifeless and
on a par with the emotional manners of high society; finally she adored
a man whom she must never see again, and who at the same time had
certain rights over her. She would need, after her marriage, to go and
live two hundred leagues from Parma.
Fabrizio was aware of Clelia's intense modesty, he knew how greatly any
extraordinary enterprise, that might form a subject for gossip, were it
discovered, was bound to displease her. And yet, driven to extremes by
the excess of his melancholy and by Clelia's constantly turning away her
eyes from him, he made bold to try to purchase two of the servants of
Signora Contarini, her aunt. One day, at nightfall, Fabrizio, dressed as
a prosperous countryman, presented himself at the door of the _palazzo_,
where one of the servants whom he had bribed was waiting for him; he
announced himself as coming from Turin and bearing letters for Clelia
from her father. The servant went to deliver the message, and took him
up to an immense ante-room on the first floor of the _palazzo_. It was
here that Fabrizio passed what was perhaps the most anxious quarter of
an hour in his life. If Clelia rejected him, there was no more hope of
peace for his mind. "To put an end to the incessant worries which my new
dignity heaps upon me, I shall remove from the Church an unworthy
priest, and, under an assumed name, seek refuge in some Charterhouse."
At length the servant came to inform him that Signorina Clelia Conti was
willing to receive him. Our hero's courage failed him completely; he
almost collapsed with fear as he climbed the stair to the second floor.
Clelia was sitting at a little table on which stood a single candle. No
sooner had she recognised Fabrizio under his disguise than she rose and
fled, hiding at the far end of the room.
"This is how you care for my salvation!" she cried to him, hiding her
face in her hands. "You know very well, when my father was at the point
of death after taking poison, I made a vow to the Madonna that I would
never see you. I have never failed to keep that vow save on that day,
the most wretched day of my life, when I felt myself bound by conscience
to snatch you from death. It is already far more than you deserve if, by
a strained and no doubt criminal interpretation of my vow, I consent to
listen to you."
This last sentence so astonished Fabrizio that it took him some moments
to grasp its joyful meaning. He had expected the most fiery anger, and
to see Clelia fly from the room; at length his presence of mind
returned, and he extinguished the one candle. Although he believed that
he had understood Clelia's orders, he was trembling all over as he
advanced towards the end of the room, where she had taken refuge behind
a sofa; he did not know whether it would offend her if he kissed her
hand; she was all tremulous with love and threw herself into his arms.
"Dear Fabrizio," she said to him, "how long you have been in coming! I
can only speak to you for a moment, for I am sure it is a great sin; and
when I promised never to see you, I am sure I meant also to promise not
to hear you speak. But how could you pursue with such barbarity the idea
of vengeance that my poor father had? For, after all, it was he who was
first nearly poisoned to assist your escape. Ought you not to do
something for me, who have exposed my reputation to such risks in order
to save you? And besides you are now bound absolutely in Holy Orders;
you could not marry me any longer, even though I should find a way of
getting rid of that odious Marchese. And then how did you dare, on the
afternoon of the procession, have the effrontery to look at me in broad
daylight, and so violate, in the most flagrant fashion, the holy promise
that I had made to the Madonna?"
Fabrizio clasped her in his arms, carried out of himself by his surprise
and joy.
A conversation which began with such a quantity of things to be said
could not finish for a long time. Fabrizio told her the exact truth as
to her father's banishment; the Duchessa had had no part in it
whatsoever, for the simple reason that she had never for a single
instant believed that the idea of poison had originated with General
Conti; she had always thought that it was a little game on the part of
the Raversi faction, who wished to drive Conte Mosca from Parma. This
historical truth developed at great length made Clelia very happy; she
was wretched at having to hate anyone who belonged to Fabrizio. Now she
no longer regarded the Duchessa with a jealous eye.
The happiness established by this evening lasted only a few days.
The worthy Don Cesare arrived from Turin; and, taking courage in the
perfect honesty of his heart, ventured to send in his name to the
Duchessa. After asking her to give him her word that she would not abuse
the confidence he was about to repose in her, he admitted that his
brother, led astray by a false point of honour, and thinking himself
challenged and lowered in public opinion by Fabrizio's escape, had felt
bound to avenge himself.
Don Cesare had not been speaking for two minutes before his cause was
won: his perfect goodness had touched the Duchessa, who was by no means
accustomed to such a spectacle. He appealed to her as a novelty.
"Hasten the marriage between the General's daughter and the Marchese
Crescenzi, and I give you my word that I will do all that lies in my
power to ensure that the General is received as though he were returning
from a tour abroad. I shall invite him to dinner; does that satisfy you?
No doubt there will be some coolness at the beginning, and the General
must on no account be in a hurry to ask for his place as governor of the
citadel. But you know that I have a friendly feeling for the Marchese,
and I shall retain no rancour towards his father-in-law."
Fortified by these words, Don Cesare came to tell his niece that she
held in her hands the life of her father, who was ill with despair. For
many months past he had not appeared at any court.
Clelia decided to go to visit her father, who was hiding under an
assumed name in a village near Turin; for he had supposed that the court
of Parma would demand his extradition from that of Turin, to put him on
his trial. She found him ill and almost insane. That same evening she
wrote Fabrizio a letter threatening an eternal rupture. On receiving
this letter, Fabrizio, who was developing a character closely resembling
that of his mistress, went into retreat in the convent of Velleja,
situated in the mountains, ten leagues from Parma. Clelia wrote him a
letter of ten pages: she had sworn to him, before, that she would never
marry the Marchese without his consent; now she asked this of him, and
Fabrizio granted it from his retreat at Velleja, in a letter full of the
purest friendship.
On receiving this letter, the friendliness of which, it must be
admitted, irritated her, Clelia herself fixed the day of her wedding,
the festivities surrounding which enhanced still further the brilliance
with which the court of Parma, that winter, shone.
_THE COURT_
Ranuccio-Ernesto V was a miser at heart; but he was desperately in love,
and he hoped to establish the Duchessa permanently at his court; he
begged his mother to accept a very considerable sum of money, and to
give entertainments. The Grand Mistress contrived to make an admirable
use of this increase of wealth; the entertainments at Parma, that
winter, recalled the great days of the court of Milan and of that
charming Prince Eugène, Viceroy of Italy, whose virtues have left so
lasting a memory.
His duties as Coadjutor had summoned Fabrizio back to Parma; but he
announced that, for spiritual reasons, he would continue his retreat in
the small apartment which his protector, Monsignor Landriani, had forced
him to take in the Archbishop's Palace; and he went to shut himself up
there, accompanied by a single servant. Thus he was present at none of
the brilliant festivities of the court, an abstention which won for him
at Parma, and throughout his future diocese, an immense reputation for
sanctity. An unforeseen consequence of this retreat, inspired in
Fabrizio solely by his profound and hopeless sorrow, was that the good
Archbishop Landriani, who had always loved him, began to be slightly
jealous of him. The Archbishop felt it his duty (and rightly) to attend
all the festivities at court, as is the custom in Italy. On these
occasions he wore a ceremonial costume, which was, more or less, the
same as that in which he was to be seen in the choir of his Cathedral.
The hundreds of servants gathered in the colonnaded ante-chamber of the
Palace never failed to rise and ask for a blessing from Monsignore, who
was kind enough to stop and give it them. It was in one of these moments
of solemn silence that Monsignor Landriani heard a voice say: "Our
Archbishop goes out to balls, and Monsignor del Dongo never leaves his
room!"
From that moment the immense favour that Fabrizio had enjoyed in the
Archbishop's Palace was at an end; but he could now fly with his own
wings. All this conduct, which had been inspired only by the despair in
which Clelia's marriage plunged him, was regarded as due to a simple and
sublime piety, and the faithful read, as a work of edification, the
translation of the genealogy of his family, which reeked of the most
insane vanity. The booksellers prepared a lithographed edition of his
portrait, which was bought up in a few days, and mainly by the humbler
classes; the engraver, in his ignorance, had reproduced round Fabrizio's
portrait a number of the ornaments which ought only to be found on the
portraits of Bishops, and to which a Coadjutor could have no claim. The
Archbishop saw one of these portraits, and his rage knew no bounds; he
sent for Fabrizio and addressed him in the harshest words, and in terms
which his passion rendered at times extremely coarse. Fabrizio required
no effort, as may well be imagined, to conduct himself as Fénelon would
have done in similar circumstances; he listened to the Archbishop with
all the humility and respect possible; and, when the prelate had ceased
speaking, told him the whole story of the translation of the genealogy
made by Conte Mosca's orders, at the time of his first imprisonment. It
had been published with a worldly object, which had always seemed to him
hardly befitting a man of his cloth. As for the portrait, he had been
entirely unconcerned with the second edition, as with the first; and the
bookseller having sent to him, at the Archbishop's Palace, during his
retreat, twenty-four copies of this second edition, he had sent his
servant to buy a twenty-fifth; and, having learned in this way that the
portrait was being sold for thirty soldi, he had sent a hundred francs
in payment of the twenty-four copies.
_THE DUCHESSA_
All these arguments, albeit set forth in the most reasonable terms by a
man who had many other sorrows in his heart, lashed the Archbishop's
anger to madness; he went so far as to accuse Fabrizio of hypocrisy.
"That is what these common people are like," Fabrizio said to himself,
"even when they have brains!"
He had at the time a more serious anxiety; this was his aunt's letters,
in which she absolutely insisted on his coming back to occupy his
apartment in the _palazzo_ Sanseverina, or at least coming to see her
sometimes. There Fabrizio was certain of hearing talk of the splendid
festivities given by the Marchese Crescenzi on the occasion of his
marriage; and this was what he was not sure of his ability to endure
without creating a scene.
When the marriage ceremony was celebrated, for eight whole days in
succession Fabrizio vowed himself to the most complete silence, after
ordering his servant and the members of the Archbishop's household with
whom he had any dealings never to utter a word to him.
Monsignor Landriani having learned of this new affectation sent for
Fabrizio far more often than usual, and tried to engage him in long
conversations; he even obliged him to attend conferences with certain
Canons from the country, who complained that the Archbishop had
infringed their privileges. Fabrizio took all these things with the
perfect indifference of a man who has other thoughts on his mind. "It
would be better for me," he thought, "to become a Carthusian; I should
suffer less among the rocks of Velleja."
He went to see his aunt, and could not restrain his tears as he embraced
her. She found him so greatly altered, his eyes, still more enlarged by
his extreme thinness, had so much the air of starting from his head, and
he himself presented so pinched and unhappy an appearance, that at this
first encounter the Duchessa herself could not restrain her tears
either; but a moment later, when she had reminded herself that all this
change in the appearance of this handsome young man had been caused by
Clelia's marriage, her feelings were almost equal in vehemence to those
of the Archbishop, although more skilfully controlled. She was so
barbarous as to discourse at length of certain picturesque details which
had been a feature of the charming entertainments given by the Marchese
Crescenzi. Fabrizio made no reply; but his eyes closed slightly with a
convulsive movement, and he became even paler than he already was, which
at first sight would have seemed impossible. In these moments of keen
grief, his pallor assumed a greenish hue.
Conte Mosca joined them, and what he then saw, a thing which seemed to
him incredible, finally and completely cured him of the jealousy which
Fabrizio had never ceased to inspire in him. This able man employed the
most delicate and ingenious turns of speech in an attempt to restore to
Fabrizio some interest in the things of this world. The Conte had always
felt for him a great esteem and a certain degree of friendship; this
friendship, being no longer counterbalanced by jealousy, became at that
moment almost devotion. "There's no denying it, he has paid dearly for
his fine fortune," he said to himself, going over the tale of Fabrizio's
misadventures. On the pretext of letting him see the picture by the
Parmigianino which the Prince had sent to the Duchessa, the Conte drew
Fabrizio aside.
"Now, my friend, let us speak as man to man: can I help you in any way?
You need not be afraid of any questions on my part; still, can money be
of use to you, can power help you? Speak, I am at your orders; if you
prefer to write, write to me."
_AMBITION_
Fabrizio embraced him tenderly and spoke of the picture.
"Your conduct is a masterpiece of the finest policy," the Conte said to
him, returning to the light tone of their previous conversation; "you
are laying up for yourself a very agreeable future, the Prince respects
you, the people venerate you, your little worn black coat gives
Monsignor Landriani some bad nights. I have some experience of life, and
I can swear to you that I should not know what advice to give you to
improve upon what I see. Your first step in the world at the age of
twenty-five has carried you to perfection. People talk of you a great
deal at court; and do you know to what you owe that distinction, unique
at your age? To the little worn black coat. The Duchessa and I have at
our disposal, as you know, Petrarch's old house on that fine slope in
the middle of the forest, near the Po; if ever you are weary of the
little mischief-makings of envy, it has occurred to me that you might be
the successor of Petrarch, whose fame will enhance your own." The Conte
was racking his brains to make a smile appear on that anchorite face,
but failed. What made the change more striking was that, before this
latest phase, if Fabrizio's features had a defect, it was that of
presenting sometimes, at the wrong moment, an expression of gaiety and
pleasure.
The Conte did not let him go without telling him that, notwithstanding
his retreat, it would be perhaps an affectation if he did not appear at
court the following Saturday, which was the Princess's birthday. These
words were a dagger-thrust to Fabrizio. "Great God!" he thought, "what
have I let myself in for here?" He could not think without shuddering of
the meeting that might occur at court. This idea absorbed every other;
he thought that the only thing left to him was to arrive at the Palace
at the precise moment at which the doors of the rooms would be opened.
And so it happened that the name of Monsignor del Dongo was one of the
first to be announced on the evening of the gala reception, and the
Princess greeted him with the greatest possible distinction. Fabrizio's
eyes were fastened on the clock, and, at the instant at which it marked
the twentieth minute of his presence in the room, he was rising to take
his leave, when the Prince joined his mother. After paying his respects
to him for some moments, Fabrizio was again, by a skilful stratagem,
making his way to the door, when there befell at his expense one of
those little trifling points of court etiquette which the Grand Mistress
knew so well how to handle: the Chamberlain in waiting ran after him to
tell him that he had been put down to make up the Prince's table at
whist. At Parma this was a signal honour, and far above the rank which
the Coadjutor held in society. To play whist with the Prince was a
marked honour even for the Archbishop. At the Chamberlain's words
Fabrizio felt his heart pierced, and although a lifelong enemy of
anything like a scene in public, he was on the point of going to tell
him that he had been seized with a sudden fit of giddiness; but he
reflected that he would be exposed to questions and polite expressions
of sympathy, more intolerable even than the game. That day he had a
horror of speaking.
Fortunately the General of the Friars Minor happened to be one of the
prominent personages who had come to pay their respects to the Princess.
This friar, a most learned man, a worthy rival of the Fontanas and the
Duvoisins, had taken his place in a far corner of the room: Fabrizio
took up a position facing him, so that he could not see the door, and
began to talk theology. But he could not prevent his ear from hearing a
servant announce the Signor Marchese and Signora Marchesa Crescenzi.
Fabrizio, to his surprise, felt a violent impulse of anger.
_WHIST_
"If I were Borso Valserra," he said to himself (this being one of the
generals of the first Sforza), "I should go and stab that lout of a
Marchese, and with that very same dagger with the ivory handle which
Clelia gave me on that happy day, and I should teach him to have the
insolence to present himself with his Marchesa in a room in which I am."
His expression altered so greatly that the General of the Friars Minor
said to him:
"Does Your Excellency feel unwell?"
"I have a raging headache . . . these lights are hurting me . . . and I
am staying here only because I have been put down for the Prince's
whist-table."
On hearing this the General of the Friars Minor, who was of plebeian
origin, was so disconcerted that, not knowing what to do, he began to
bow to Fabrizio, who, for his part, far more seriously disturbed than
the General, started to talk with a strange volubility: he noticed that
there was a great silence in the room behind him, but would not turn
round to look. Suddenly a baton tapped a desk; a _ritornello_ was
played, and the famous Signora P---- sang that air of Cimarosa, at one
time so popular: _Quelle pupille tenere_!
Fabrizio stood firm throughout the opening bars, but presently his anger
melted away, and he felt a compelling need to shed tears. "Great God!"
he said to himself, "what a ridiculous scene! and with my cloth, too!"
He felt it wiser to talk about himself.
"These violent headaches, when I do anything to thwart them, as I am
doing this evening," he said to the General of the Minorites, "end in
floods of tears which provide food for scandal in a man of our calling;
and so I request Your Illustrious Reverence to allow me to look at him
while I cry, and not to pay any attention."
"Our Father Provincial at Catanzaro suffers from the same disability,"
said the General of the Minorites. And he began in an undertone a long
narrative.
The absurdity of this story, which included the details of the Father
Provincial's evening meals, made Fabrizio smile, a thing which had not
happened to him for a long time; but presently he ceased to listen to
the General of the Minorites. Signora P---- was singing, with divine
talent, an air of Pergolese (the Duchessa had a fondness for old music).
She was interrupted by a slight sound, a few feet away from Fabrizio;
for the first time in the evening, he turned his head, to look. The
chair that had been the cause of this faint creak in the woodwork of the
floor was occupied by the Marchesa Crescenzi whose eyes, filled with
tears, met the direct gaze of Fabrizio's which were in much the same
state. The Marchesa bent her head; Fabrizio continued to gaze at her for
some moments: he made a thorough study of that head loaded with
diamonds; but his gaze expressed anger and disdain. Then, saying to
himself: "_and my eyes shall never look upon you_," he turned back to
his Father General, and said to him:
"There, now, my weakness is taking me worse than ever."
And indeed, Fabrizio wept hot tears for more than half an hour.
Fortunately, a Symphony of Mozart, horribly mutilated, as is the way in
Italy, came to his rescue and helped him to dry his tears.
_CLELIA_
He stood firm and did not turn his eyes towards the Marchesa Crescenzi;
but Signora P---- sang again, and Fabrizio's soul, soothed by his tears,
arrived at a state of perfect repose. Then life appeared to him in a new
light. "Am I pretending," he asked himself, "to be able to forget her in
the first few moments? Would such a thing be possible?" The idea came to
him: "Can I be more unhappy than I have been for the last two months?
Then, if nothing can add to my anguish, why resist the pleasure of
seeing her? She has forgotten her vows; she is fickle: are not all women
so? But who could deny her a heavenly beauty? She has a look in her eyes
that sends me into ecstasies, whereas I have to make an effort to force
myself to look at the women who are considered the greatest beauties!
Very well, why not let myself be enraptured? It will be at least a
moment of respite."
Fabrizio had some knowledge of men, but no experience of the passions,
otherwise he would have told himself that this momentary pleasure, to
which he was about to yield, would render futile all the efforts that he
had been making for the last two months to forget Clelia.
That poor woman would not have come to this party save under compulsion
from her husband; even then she wished to slip away after half an hour,
on the excuse of her health, but the Marchese assured her that to send
for her carriage to go away, when many carriages were still arriving,
would be a thing absolutely without precedent, which might even be
interpreted as an indirect criticism of the party given by the Princess.
"In my capacity as _Cavaliere d'onore_," the Marchese added, "I have to
remain in the drawing-room at the Princess's orders, until everyone has
gone. There may be and no doubt will be orders to be given to the
servants, they are so careless! And would you have a mere Gentleman
Usher usurp that honour?"
Clelia resigned herself; she had not seen Fabrizio; she still hoped that
he might not have come to this party. But at the moment when the concert
was about to begin, the Princess having given the ladies leave to be
seated, Clelia, who was not at all alert in that sort of thing, let all
the best places near the Princess be snatched from her, and was obliged
to go and look for a chair at the end of the room, in the very corner to
which Fabrizio had withdrawn. When she reached her chair, the costume,
unusual in such a place, of the General of the Friars Minor caught her
eye, and at first she did not observe the other man, slim and dressed in
a plain black coat, who was talking to him; nevertheless a certain
secret impulse brought her gaze to rest on this man. "Everyone here is
wearing uniform, or a richly embroidered coat: who can that young man be
in such a plain black coat?" She was looking at him, profoundly
attentive, when a lady, taking her seat beside her, caused her chair to
move. Fabrizio turned his head: she did not recognise him, he had so
altered. At first she said to herself: "That is like him, it must be his
elder brother; but I thought there were only a few years between them,
and that is a man of forty." Suddenly she recognised him by a movement
of his lips.
"Poor man, how he has suffered!" she said to herself. And she bent her
head, bowed down by grief, and not in fidelity to her vow. Her heart was
convulsed with pity; "after nine months in prison, he did not look
anything like that." She did not look at him again; but, without
actually turning her eyes in his direction, she could see all his
movements.
After the concert, she saw him go up to the Prince's card-table, placed
a few feet from the throne; she breathed a sigh of relief when Fabrizio
was thus removed to a certain distance from her.
But the Marchese Crescenzi had been greatly annoyed to see his wife
relegated to a place so far from the throne; all evening he had been
occupied in persuading a lady seated three chairs away from the
Princess, whose husband was under a financial obligation to him, that
she would do well to change places with the Marchesa. The poor woman
resisting, as was natural, he went in search of the debtor husband, who
let his better half hear the sad voice of reason, and finally the
Marchese had the pleasure of effecting the exchange; he went to find his
wife. "You are always too modest," he said to her. "Why walk like that
with downcast eyes? Anyone would take you for one of those cits' wives
astonished at finding themselves here, whom everyone else is astonished,
too, to see here. That fool of a Grand Mistress does nothing else but
collect them! And they talk of retarding the advance of Jacobinism!
Remember that your husband occupies the first position, among the
gentlemen, at the Princess's court; and that even should the Republicans
succeed in suppressing the court, and even the nobility, your husband
would still be the richest man in this State. That is an idea which you
do not keep sufficiently in your head."
The chair on which the Marchese had the pleasure of installing his wife
was but six paces from the Prince's card-table: she saw Fabrizio only in
profile, but she found him grown so thin, he had, above all, the air of
being so far above everything that might happen in this world, he who
before would never let any incident pass without making his comment,
that she finally arrived at the terrible conclusion: Fabrizio had
altogether changed; he had forgotten her; if he had grown so thin, that
was the effect of the severe fasts to which his piety subjected him.
Clelia was confirmed in this sad thought by the conversation of all her
neighbours: the name of the Coadjutor was on every tongue; they sought a
reason for the signal favour which they saw conferred upon him: for him,
so young, to be admitted to the Prince's table! They marvelled at the
polite indifference and the air of pride with which he threw down his
cards, even when he had His Highness for a partner.
"But this is incredible!" cried certain old courtiers; "his aunt's
favour has quite turned his head. . . . But, mercifully, it won't last;
our Sovereign does not like people to put on these little airs of
superiority." The Duchessa approached the Prince; the courtiers, who
kept at a most respectful distance from the card-table, so that they
could hear only a few stray words of the Prince's conversation, noticed
that Fabrizio blushed deeply. "His aunt has been teaching him a lesson,"
they said to themselves, "about those grand airs of indifference."
Fabrizio had just caught the sound of Clelia's voice, she was replying
to the Princess, who, in making her tour of the ball-room, had addressed
a few words to the wife of her _Cavaliere d'onore_. The moment arrived
when Fabrizio had to change his place at the whist-table; he then found
himself directly opposite Clelia, and gave himself up repeatedly to the
pleasure of contemplating her. The poor Marchesa, feeling his gaze rest
upon her, lost countenance altogether. More than once she forgot what
she owed to her vow: in her desire to read what was going on in
Fabrizio's heart, she fixed her eyes on him.
The Prince's game ended, the ladies rose to go into the supper-room.
There was some slight confusion. Fabrizio found himself close to Clelia;
his mind was still quite made up, but he happened to recognise a faint
perfume which she used on her clothes; this sensation overthrew all the
resolutions that he had made. He approached her and repeated, in an
undertone and as though he were speaking to himself, two lines from that
sonnet of Petrarch which he had sent her from Lake Maggiore, printed on
a silk handkerchief:
"Nessun visse giammai più di me lieto;
Nessun vive più tristo e giorni e notti."
"No, he has not forgotten me," Clelia told herself with a transport of
joy. "That fine soul is not inconstant!"
"Esser po in prima ogni impossibil cosa
Ch'altri che morte od ella sani il colpo
Ch'Amor co' suoi begli occhi al cor m'impresse,"
Clelia ventured to repeat to herself these lines of Petrarch.
_ABSENCE_
The Princess withdrew immediately after supper; the Prince had gone with
her to her room and did not appear again in the reception rooms. As
soon as this became known, everyone wished to leave at once; there was
complete confusion in the ante-rooms; Clelia found herself close to
Fabrizio; the profound misery depicted on his features moved her to
pity. "Let us forget the past," she said to him, "and keep this reminder
of _friendship_." As she said these words, she held out her fan so that
he might take it.
Everything changed in Fabrizio's eyes; in an instant he was another man;
the following day he announced that his retreat was at an end, and
returned to occupy his magnificent apartment in the _palazzo_
Sanseverina. The Archbishop said, and believed, that the favour which
the Prince had shewn him in admitting him to his game had completely
turned the head of this new saint: the Duchessa saw that he had come to
terms with Clelia. This thought, coming to intensify the misery that was
caused her by the memory of a fatal promise, finally decided her to
absent herself for a while. People marvelled at her folly. What! Leave
the court at the moment when the favour that she enjoyed appeared to
have no bounds! The Conte, perfectly happy since he had seen that there
was no love between Fabrizio and the Duchessa, said to his friend: "This
new Prince is virtue incarnate, but I have called him _that boy_: will
he ever forgive me? I can see only one way of putting myself back in his
good books, that is absence. I am going to shew myself a perfect model
of courtesy and respect, after which I shall be ill, and shall ask leave
to retire. You will allow me that, now that Fabrizio's fortune is
assured. But will you make me the immense sacrifice," he added,
laughing, "of exchanging the sublime title of Duchessa for another
greatly inferior? For my own amusement, I am leaving everything here in
an inextricable confusion; I had four or five workers in my various
Ministries, I placed them all on the pension list two months ago,
because they read the French newspapers; and I have filled their places
with blockheads of the first order.
"After our departure, the Prince will find himself in such difficulties
that, in spite of the horror that he feels for Rassi's character, I have
no doubt that he will be obliged to recall him, and I myself am only
awaiting an order from the tyrant who disposes of my fate to write a
letter of tender friendship to my friend Rassi, and tell him that I have
every reason to hope that presently justice will be done to his merits."