Carried away by the train of events, we have not had time to sketch the
comic race of courtiers who swarm at the court of Parma and who made
fatuous comments on the incidents which we have related. What in that
country makes a small noble, adorned with an income of three or four
thousand lire, worthy to figure in black stockings at the Prince's
levees, is, first and foremost, that he shall never have read Voltaire
and Rousseau: this condition it is not very difficult to fulfil. He must
then know how to speak with emotion of the Sovereign's cold, or of the
latest case of mineralogical specimens that has come to him from Saxony.
If, after this, you were not absent from mass for a single day in the
year, if you could include in the number of your intimate friends two or
three prominent monks, the Prince deigned to address a few words to you
once every year, a fortnight before or a fortnight after the first of
January, which brought you great relief in your parish, and the tax
collector dared not press you unduly if you were in arrears with the
annual sum of one hundred francs with which your small estate was
burdened.
Signor Gonzo was a poor devil of this sort, very noble, who, apart from
possessing some little fortune of his own, had obtained, through the
Marchese Crescenzi's influence, a magnificent post which brought him in
eleven hundred and fifty francs annually. This man might have dined at
home; but he had one passion: he was never at his ease and happy except
when he found himself in the drawing-room of some great personage who
said to him from time to time: "Hold your tongue, Gonzo, you're a
perfect fool." This judgment was prompted by ill temper, for Gonzo had
almost always more intelligence than the great personage. He would
discuss anything, and quite gracefully, besides, he was ready to change
his opinion on a grimace from the master of the house. To tell the
truth, although of a profound subtlety in securing his own interests, he
had not an idea in his head, and, when the Prince had not a cold, was
sometimes embarrassed as he came into a drawing-room.
_COURTIERS_
What had, in Parma, won Gonzo a reputation was a magnificent cocked hat,
adorned with a slightly dilapidated black plume, which he wore even with
evening dress; but you ought to have seen the way in which he carried
this plume, whether upon his head or in his hand; there were talent and
importance combined. He inquired with genuine anxiety after the health
of the Marchesa's little dog, and, if the _palazzo_ Crescenzi had caught
fire, he would have risked his life to save one of those fine armchairs
in gold brocade, which for so many years had caught in his black silk
breeches, whenever it so happened that he ventured to sit down for a
moment.
Seven or eight persons of this species appeared every evening at seven
o'clock in the Marchesa Crescenzi's drawing-room. No sooner had they sat
down than a lackey, magnificently attired in a daffodil-yellow livery,
covered all over with silver braid, as was the red waistcoat which
completed his magnificence, came to take the poor devils' hats and
canes. He was immediately followed by a footman carrying an
infinitesimal cup of coffee, supported on a stem of silver filigree; and
every half hour a butler, wearing a sword and a magnificent coat, in the
French style, brought round ices.
Half an hour after the threadbare little courtiers, one saw arrive five
or six officers, talking in loud voices and with a very military air,
and usually discussing the number of buttons which ought to be on the
soldiers' uniform in order that the Commander in Chief might gain
victories. It would not have been prudent to quote a French newspaper in
this drawing-room; for, even when the news itself was of the most
agreeable kind, as for instance that fifty Liberals had been shot in
Spain, the speaker none the less remained convicted of having read a
French newspaper. The crowning effort of all these people's skill was to
obtain every ten years an increase of 150 francs in their pensions. It
is thus that the Prince shares with his nobility the pleasure of
reigning over all the peasants and burgesses of the land.
The principal personage, beyond all question, of the Crescenzi
drawing-room, was the Cavaliere Foscarini, an entirely honest man; in
consequence of which he had been in prison off and on, under every
government. He had been a member of that famous Chamber of Deputies
which, at Milan, rejected the Registration Law presented to them by
Napoleon, an action of very rare occurrence in history. Cavaliere
Foscarini, after having been for twenty years a friend of the Marchese's
mother, had remained the influential man in the household. He had always
some amusing story to tell, but nothing escaped his shrewd perception;
and the young Marchesa, who felt herself guilty at heart, trembled
before him.
As Gonzo had a regular passion for the great gentleman, who said rude
things to him and moved him to tears once or twice every year, his mania
was to seek to do him trifling services; and, if he had not been
paralysed by the habits of an extreme poverty, he might sometimes have
succeeded, for he was not lacking in a certain ingredient of shrewdness,
and a far greater effrontery.
Gonzo, as we have seen him, felt some contempt for the Marchesa
Crescenzi, for never in her life had she addressed a word to him that
was not quite civil; but after all she was the wife of the famous
Marchese Crescenzi, _Cavaliere d'onore_ to the Princess, who, once or
twice in a month, used to say to Gonzo: "Hold your tongue, Gonzo, you're
a perfect fool."
_SONNETS_
Gonzo observed that everything which was said about little Annetta
Marini made the Marchesa emerge for a moment from the state of dreamy
indifference in which as a rule she remained plunged until the clock
struck eleven; then she made tea, and offered a cup to each of the men
present, addressing him by name. After which, at the moment of her
withdrawing to her room, she seemed to find a momentary gaiety, and this
was the time chosen for repeating to her satirical sonnets.
They compose such sonnets admirably in Italy: it is the one kind of
literature that has still a little vitality; as a matter of fact, it is
not subjected to the censor, and the courtiers of the _casa_ Crescenzi
invariably prefaced their sonnets with these words: "Will the Signora
Marchesa permit one to repeat to her a very bad sonnet?" And when the
sonnet had been greeted with laughter and had been repeated several
times, one of the officers would not fail to exclaim: "The Minister of
Police ought to see about giving a bit of hanging to the authors of such
atrocities." Middle class society, on the other hand, welcomes these
sonnets with the most open admiration, and the lawyers' clerks sell
copies of them.
From the sort of curiosity shown by the Marchesa, Gonzo imagined that
too much had been said in front of her of the beauty of the little
Marini, who moreover had a fortune of a million, and that the other
woman was jealous of her. As, with his incessant smile and his complete
effrontery towards all that was not noble, Gonzo found his way
everywhere, on the very next day he arrived in the Marchesa's
drawing-room, carrying his plumed hat in a triumphant fashion which was
to be seen perhaps only once or twice in the year, when the Prince had
said to him: "_Addio_, Gonzo."
After respectfully greeting the Marchesa, Gonzo did not withdraw as
usual to take his seat on the chair which had just been pushed forward
for him. He took his stand in the middle of the circle and exclaimed
bluntly: "I have seen the portrait of Monsignor del Dongo." Clelia was
so surprised that she was obliged to lean upon the arm of her chair; she
tried to face the storm, but presently was obliged to leave the room.
"You must agree, my poor Gonzo, that your tactlessness is unique," came
arrogantly from one of the officers, who was finishing his fourth ice.
"Don't you know that the Coadjutor, who was one of the most gallant
Colonels in Napoleon's army, played a trick that ought to have hanged
him on the Marchesa's father, when he walked out of the citadel where
General Fabio Conti was in command, as he might have walked out of the
Steccata?" (The Steccata is the principal church in Parma.)
"Indeed I am ignorant of many things, my dear Captain, and I am a poor
imbecile who makes blunders all day long."
This reply, quite to the Italian taste, caused a laugh at the expense of
the brilliant officer. The Marchesa soon returned; she had armed herself
with courage, and was not without hope of being able herself to admire
this portrait, which was said to be excellent. She spoke with praise of
the talent of Hayez, who had painted it. Unconsciously she addressed
charming smiles at Gonzo, who looked malevolently at the officer. As all
the other courtiers of the house indulged in the same pastime, the
officer took flight, not without vowing a deadly hatred against Gonzo;
the latter was triumphant, and later in the evening, when he took his
leave, was invited to dine next day.
_GONZO_
"I can tell you something more," cried Gonzo, the following evening,
after dinner, when the servants had left the room: "the latest thing is
that our Coadjutor has fallen in love with the little Marini!"
One may judge of the agitation that arose in Clelia's heart on hearing
so extraordinary an announcement. The Marchese himself was moved.
"But, Gonzo my friend, you are off the track, as usual! And you ought to
speak with a little more caution of a person who has had the honour to
sit down eleven times at his Highness's whist-table."
"Well, Signor Marchese," replied Gonzo with the coarseness of people of
his sort, "I can promise you that he would just as soon sit down to the
little Marini. But it is enough that these details displease you; they
no longer exist for me, who desire above all things not to shock my
beloved Marchese."
Regularly, after dinner, the Marchese used to retire to take a _siesta_.
He let the time pass that day; but Gonzo would sooner have cut out his
tongue than have said another word about the little Marini; and, every
moment, he began a speech, so planned that the Marchese might hope that
he was about to return to the subject of the little lady's love affairs.
Gonzo had in a superior degree that Italian quality of mind which
consists in exquisitely delaying the launching of the word for which
one's hearer longs. The poor Marchese, dying of curiosity, was obliged
to make advances; he told Gonzo that, when he had the pleasure of dining
with him, he ate twice as much as usual. Gonzo did not take the hint, he
began to describe a magnificent collection of pictures which the
Marchesa Balbi, the late Prince's mistress, was forming; three or four
times he spoke of Hayez, in a slow and measured tone full of the most
profound admiration. The Marchese said to himself: "Now he is coming to
the portrait which the little Marini ordered!" But this was what Gonzo
took good care not to do. Five o'clock struck, which put the Marchese in
the worst of tempers, for he was in the habit of getting into his
carriage at half past five, after his _siesta_, to drive to the Corso.
"This is what you do with your stupid talk!" he said rudely to Gonzo:
"you are making me reach the Corso after the Princess, whose _Cavaliere
d'onore_ I am, when she may have orders to give me. Come along! Hurry
up! Tell me in a few words, if you can, what is this so-called love
affair of the Coadjutor?"
But Gonzo wished to keep this anecdote for the Marchesa, who had invited
him to dine; he did _hurry up_, in a very few words, the story demanded of
him, and the Marchese, half asleep, ran off to take his _siesta_. Gonzo
adopted a wholly different manner with the poor Marchesa. She had
remained so young and natural in spite of her high position, that she
felt it her duty to make amends for the rudeness with which the Marchese
had just spoken to Gonzo. Charmed by this success, her guest recovered
all his eloquence, and made it a pleasure, no less than a duty, to enter
into endless details with her.
Little Annetta Marini gave as much as a sequin for each place that was
kept for her for the sermons; she always arrived with two of her aunts
and her father's old cashier. These places, which were reserved for her
overnight, were generally chosen almost opposite the pulpit, but
slightly in the direction of the high altar, for she had noticed that
the Coadjutor often turned towards the altar. Now, what the public also
had noticed was that, _not infrequently_, those speaking eyes of the
young preacher rested with evident pleasure on the young heiress, that
striking beauty; and apparently with some attention, for, when he had
his eyes fixed on her, his sermon became learned; the quotations began
to abound in it, there was no more sign of that eloquence which springs
from the heart; and the ladies, whose interest ceased almost at once,
began to look at the Marini and to find fault with her.
Clelia made him repeat to her three times over all these singular
details. At the third repetition she became lost in meditation; she was
calculating that just fourteen months had passed since she last saw
Fabrizio. "Would it be very wrong," she asked herself, "to spend an hour
in a church, not to see Fabrizio but to hear a famous preacher? Besides,
I shall take a seat a long way from the pulpit, and I shall look at
Fabrizio only once as I go in and once more at the end of the
sermon. . . . No," Clelia said to herself, "it is not Fabrizio I am going
to see, I am going to hear the astounding preacher!" In the midst of all
these reasonings, the Marchesa felt some remorse; her conduct had been so
exemplary for fourteen months! "Well," she said to herself, in order to
secure some peace of mind, "if the first woman to arrive this evening
has been to hear Monsignor del Dongo, I shall go too; if she has not
been, I shall stay away."
Having come to this decision, the Marchesa made Gonzo happy by saying to
him:
"Try to find out on what day the Coadjutor will be preaching, and in
what church. This evening, before you go, I shall perhaps have a
commission to give you."
No sooner had Gonzo set off for the Corso than Clelia went to take the
air in the garden of her _palazzo_. She did not consider the objection
that for ten months she had not set foot in it. She was lively,
animated; she had a colour. That evening, as each boring visitor entered
the room, her heart throbbed with emotion. At length they announced
Gonzo, who at the first glance saw that he was going to be the
indispensable person for the next week; "The Marchesa is jealous of the
little Marini, and, upon my word, it would be a fine drama to put on the
stage," he said to himself, "with the Marchesa playing the leading lady,
little Annetta the juvenile, and Monsignor del Dongo the lover! Upon my
word, the seats would not be too dear at two francs." He was beside
himself with joy, and throughout the evening cut everybody short, and
told the most ridiculous stories (that, for example, of the famous
actress and the Marquis de Pequigny, which he had heard the day before
from a French visitor). The Marchesa, for her part, could not stay in
one place; she moved about the drawing-room, she passed into a gallery
adjoining it into which the Marchese had admitted no picture that had
not cost more than twenty thousand francs. These pictures spoke in so
clear a language that evening that they wore out the Marchesa's heart
with the force of her emotion. At last she heard the double doors open,
she ran to the drawing-room: it was the Marchesa Raversi! But, on making
her the customary polite speeches, Clelia felt that her voice was
failing her. The Marchesa made her repeat twice the question: "What do
you think of the fashionable preacher?" which she had not heard at
first.
"I did regard him as a little intriguer, a most worthy nephew of the
illustrious Contessa Mosca, but the last time he preached; why, it was
at the Church of the Visitation, opposite you, he was so sublime, that I
could not hate him any longer, and I regard him as the most eloquent man
I have ever heard."
"So you have been to hear his sermons?" said Clelia, trembling with
happiness.
"Why," the Marchesa laughed, "haven't you been listening? I wouldn't
miss one for anything in the world. They say that his lungs are
affected, and that soon he will have to give up preaching."
No sooner had the Marchesa left than Clelia called Gonzo to the gallery.
"I have almost decided," she told him, "to hear this preacher who is so
highly praised. When does he preach?"
"Next Monday, that is to say in three days from now; and one would say
that he had guessed Your Excellency's intention, for he is coming to
preach in the Church of the Visitation."
There was more to be settled; but Clelia could no longer muster enough
voice to speak: she took five or six turns of the gallery without adding
a word. Gonzo said to himself: "There is vengeance at work. How can
anyone have the insolence to escape from a prison, especially when he is
guarded by a hero like General Fabio Conti?
"However, you must make haste," he added with delicate irony; "his lungs
are affected. I heard Doctor Rambo say that he has not a year to live;
God is punishing him for having broken his bond by treacherously
escaping from the citadel."
The Marchesa sat down on the divan in the gallery, and made a sign to
Gonzo to follow her example. After some moments of silence she handed
him a little purse in which she had a few sequins ready. "Reserve four
places for me."
"Will it be permitted for poor Gonzo to slip in Your Excellency's
train?"
"Certainly. Reserve five places. . . . I do not in the least mind," she
added, "whether I am near the pulpit; but I should like to see Signorina
Marini, who they say is so pretty."
The Marchesa could not live through the three days that separated her
from the famous Monday, the day of the sermon. Gonzo, inasmuch as it was
a signal honour to be seen in the company of so great a lady, had put on
his French coat with his sword; this was not all, taking advantage of
the proximity of the _palazzo_, he had had carried into the church a
magnificent gilt armchair for the Marchesa, which was thought the last
word in insolence by the middle classes. One may imagine how the poor
Marchesa felt when she saw this armchair, which had been placed directly
opposite the pulpit. Clelia was in such confusion, with downcast eyes,
shrinking into a corner of the huge chair, that she had not even the
courage to look at the little Marini, whom Gonzo pointed out to her with
his hand with an effrontery which amazed her. Everyone not of noble
birth was absolutely nothing in the eyes of this courtier.
Fabrizio appeared in the pulpit; he was so thin, so pale, so _consumed_,
that Clelia's eyes immediately filled with tears. Fabrizio uttered a few
words, then stopped, as though his voice had suddenly failed; he tried
in vain to begin various sentences; he turned round and took up a sheet
of paper:
"Brethren," he said, "an unhappy soul and one well worthy of all your
pity requests you, through my lips, to pray for the ending of his
torments, which will cease only with his life."
Fabrizio read the rest of his paper very slowly; but the expression of
his voice was such that before he was halfway through the prayer,
everyone was weeping, even Gonzo. "At any rate, I shall not be noticed,"
thought the Marchesa, bursting into tears.
_THE ORANGERY_
While he was reading from the paper, Fabrizio found two or three ideas
concerning the state of the unhappy man for whom he had come to beg the
prayers of the faithful. Presently thoughts came to him in abundance.
While he appeared to be addressing the public, he spoke only to the
Marchesa. He ended his discourse a little sooner than was usual,
because, in spite of his efforts to control them, his tears got the
better of him to such a point that he was no longer able to pronounce
his words in an intelligible manner. The good judges found this sermon
strange but quite equal, in pathos at least, to the famous sermon
preached with the lighted candles. As for Clelia, no sooner had she
heard the first ten lines of the prayer read by Fabrizio than it seemed
to her an atrocious crime to have been able to spend fourteen months
without seeing him. On her return home she took to her bed, to be able
to think of Fabrizio with perfect freedom; and next morning, at an early
hour, Fabrizio received a note couched in the following terms:
"We rely upon your honour; find four _bravi_, of whose discretion you
can be sure, and to-morrow, when midnight sounds from the Steccata, be
by a little door which bears the number 19, in the Strada San Paolo.
Remember that you may be attacked, do not come alone."
On recognising that heavenly script, Fabrizio fell on his knees and
burst into tears. "At last," he cried, "after fourteen months and eight
days! Farewell to preaching."
It would take too long to describe all the varieties of folly to which
the hearts of Fabrizio and Clelia were a prey that day. The little door
indicated in the note was none other than that of the orangery of the
_palazzo_ Crescenzi, and ten times in the day Fabrizio found an excuse
to visit it. He armed himself, and alone, shortly before midnight, with
a rapid step, was passing by the door when, to his inexpressible joy, he
heard a well known voice say in a very low whisper:
"Come in here, friend of my heart."
Fabrizio entered cautiously and found himself actually in the orangery,
but opposite a window heavily barred which stood three or four feet
above the ground. The darkness was intense. Fabrizio had heard a slight
sound in this window, and was exploring the bars with his hand, when he
felt another hand, slipped through the bars, take hold of his and carry
it to a pair of lips which gave it a kiss.
"It is I," said a dear voice, "who have come here to tell you that I
love you, and to ask you if you are willing to obey me."
One may imagine the answer, the joy, the astonishment of Fabrizio; after
the first transports, Clelia said to him:
"I have made a vow to the Madonna, as you know, never to see you; that
is why I receive you in this profound darkness. I wish you to understand
dearly that, should you ever force me to look at you in the daylight,
all would be over between us. But first of all, I do not wish you to
preach before Annetta Marini, and do not go and think that it was I who
was so foolish as to have an armchair carried into the House of God."
"My dear angel, I shall never preach again before anyone; I have been
preaching only in the hope that one day I might see you."
"Do not speak like that, remember that it is not permitted to me to see
you."
Here we shall ask leave to pass over, without saying a single word about
them, an interval of three years.
At the time when our story is resumed, Conte Mosca had long since
returned to Parma, as Prime Minister, and was more powerful than ever.
After three years of divine happiness, Fabrizio's heart underwent a
caprice of affection which led to a complete change in his
circumstances. The Marchesa had a charming little boy two years old,
Sandrino, who was his mother's joy; he was always with her or on the
knees of the Marchese Crescenzi; Fabrizio, on the other hand, hardly
ever saw him; he did not wish him to become accustomed to loving another
father. He formed the plan of taking the child away before his memories
should have grown distinct.
_L'AMICIZIA_
In the long hours of each day when the Marchesa could not see her lover,
Sandrino's company consoled her; for we have to confess a thing which
will seem strange north of the Alps; in spite of her errors she had
remained true to her vow; she had promised the Madonna, as the reader
may perhaps remember, never to see Fabrizio; these had been her exact
words; consequently she received him only at night, and there was never
any light in the room.
But every evening he was received by his mistress; and, what is worthy
of admiration, in the midst of a court devoured by curiosity and envy,
Fabrizio's precautions had been so ably calculated that this _amicizia_,
as it is called in Lombardy, had never even been suspected. Their love
was too intense for quarrels not to occur; Clelia was extremely given to
jealousy, but almost always their quarrels sprang from another cause.
Fabrizio had made use of some public ceremony in order to be in the same
place as the Marchesa and to look at her; she then seized a pretext to
escape quickly, and for a long time afterwards banished her lover.
Amazement was felt at the court of Parma that no intrigue should be
known of a woman so remarkable both for her beauty and for the loftiness
of her mind; she gave rise to passions which inspired many foolish
actions, and often Fabrizio too was jealous.
The good Archbishop Landriani had long been dead; the piety, the
exemplary morals, the eloquence of Fabrizio had made him be forgotten;
his own elder brother was dead and all the wealth of his family had come
to him. From this time onwards he distributed annually among the vicars
and curates of his diocese the hundred odd thousand francs which the
Archbishopric of Parma brought him in.
It would be difficult to imagine a life more honoured, more honourable
or more useful than Fabrizio had made for himself, when everything was
upset by this unfortunate caprice of paternal affection.
"According to the vow which I respect and which nevertheless is the bane
of my life, since you refuse to see me during the day," he said once to
Clelia, "I am obliged to live perpetually alone, with no other
distraction than my work; and besides I have not enough work. In the
course of this stern and sad way of passing the long hours of each day,
an idea has occurred to me, which is now torturing me, and against which
I have been striving in vain for six months: my son will not love me at
all; he never hears my name mentioned. Brought up amid all the pleasing
luxury of the _palazzo_ Crescenzi, he barely knows me. On the rare
occasions when I do see him, I think of his mother, whose heavenly
beauty he recalls to me, and whom I may not see, and he must find me a
serious person, which, with children, means sad."
"Well," said the Marchesa, "to what is all this speech leading? It
frightens me."
"To my having my son; I wish him to live with me; I wish to see him
every day; I wish him to grow accustomed to loving me; I wish to love
him myself at my leisure. Since a fatality without counterpart in the
world decrees that I must be deprived of that happiness which so many
other tender hearts enjoy, and forbids me to pass my life with all that
I adore, I wish at least to have beside me a creature who recalls you to
my heart, who to some extent takes your place. Men and affairs are a
burden to me in my enforced solitude; you know that ambition has always
been a vain word to me, since the moment when I had the good fortune to
be locked up by Barbone; and anything that is not felt in my heart seems
to me fatuous in the melancholy which in your absence overwhelms me."
_SANDRINO_
One can imagine the keen anguish with which her lover's grief filled the
heart of poor Clelia; her sorrow was all the more intense, as she felt
that Fabrizio had some justification. She went the length of wondering
whether she ought not to try to obtain a release from her vow. Then she
would receive Fabrizio during the day like any other person in society,
and her reputation for sagacity was too well established for any scandal
to arise. She told herself that by spending enough money she could
procure a dispensation from her vow; but she felt also that this purely
worldly arrangement would not set her conscience at rest, and that an
angry heaven might perhaps punish her for this fresh crime.
On the other hand, if she consented to yield to so natural a desire on
the part of Fabrizio, if she sought not to hurt that tender heart which
she knew so well, and whose tranquillity her singular vow so strangely
jeopardised, what chance was there of abducting the only son of one of
the greatest nobles in Italy without the fraud's being discovered? The
Marchese Crescenzi would spend enormous sums, would himself conduct the
investigations, and sooner or later the facts of the abduction would
become known. There was only one way of meeting this danger, the child
must be sent abroad, to Edinburgh, for instance, or to Paris; but this
was a course to which the mother's affection could never consent. The
other plan proposed by Fabrizio, which was indeed the more reasonable of
the two, had something sinister about it, and was almost more alarming
still in the eyes of this despairing mother; she must, said Fabrizio,
feign an illness for the child; he would grow steadily worse, until
finally he died in the Marchese Crescenzi's absence.
A repugnance which, in Clelia, amounted to terror, caused a rupture that
could not last.
Clelia insisted that they must not tempt God; that this beloved son was
the fruit of a crime, and that if they provoked the divine anger
further, God would not fail to call him back to Himself. Fabrizio spoke
again of his strange destiny: "The station to which chance has called
me," he said to Clelia, "and my love oblige me to dwell in an eternal
solitude, I cannot, like the majority of my brethren, taste the
pleasures of an intimate society, since you will receive me only in the
darkness, which reduces to a few moments, so to speak, the part of my
life which I may spend with you."
Tears flowed in abundance. Clelia fell ill; but she loved Fabrizio too
well to maintain her opposition to the terrible sacrifice that he
demanded of her. Apparently, Sandrino fell ill; the Marchese sent in
haste for the most celebrated doctors, and Clelia at once encountered a
terrible difficulty which she had not foreseen: she must prevent this
adored child from taking any of the remedies ordered by the doctors; it
was no small matter.
The child, kept in bed longer than was good for his health, became
really ill. How was one to explain to the doctors the cause of his
malady? Torn asunder by two conflicting interests both so dear to her,
Clelia was within an ace of losing her reason. Must she consent to an
apparent recovery, and so sacrifice all the results of that long and
painful make-believe? Fabrizio, for his part, could neither forgive
himself the violence he was doing to the heart of his mistress nor
abandon his project. He had found a way of being admitted every night to
the sick child's room, which had led to another complication. The
Marchesa came to attend to her son, and sometimes Fabrizio was obliged
to see her by candle-light, which seemed to the poor sick heart of
Clelia a horrible sin and one that foreboded the death of Sandrino. In
vain had the most famous casuists, consulted as to the necessity of
adherence to a vow in a case where its performance would obviously do
harm, replied that the vow could not be regarded as broken in a criminal
fashion, so long as the person bound by a promise to God failed to keep
that promise not for a vain pleasure of the senses but so as not to
cause an obvious evil. The Marchesa was none the less in despair, and
Fabrizio could see the time coming when his strange idea was going to
bring about the death of Clelia and that of his son.
He had recourse to his intimate friend, Conte Mosca, who, for all the
old Minister that he was, was moved by this tale of love of which to a
great extent he had been ignorant.
"I can procure for you the Marchese's absence for five or six days at
least: when do you require it?"
A little later, Fabrizio came to inform the Conte that everything was in
readiness now for them to take advantage of the Marchese's absence.
Two days after this, as the Marchese was riding home from one of his
estates in the neighbourhood of Mantua, a party of brigands, evidently
hired to execute some personal vengeance, carried him off, without
maltreating him in any way, and placed him in a boat which took three
days to travel down the Po, making the same journey that Fabrizio had
made long ago, after the famous affair with Giletti. On the fourth day,
the brigands marooned the Marchese on a desert island in the Po, taking
care first to rob him completely, and to leave him no money or other
object that had the slightest value. It was two whole days before the
Marchese managed to reach his _palazzo_ in Parma; he found it draped in
black and all his household in mourning.
This abduction, very skilfully carried out, had a deplorable
consequence: Sandrino, secretly installed in a large and fine house
where the Marchesa came to see him almost every day, died after a few
months. Clelia imagined herself to have been visited with a just
punishment, for having been unfaithful to her vow to the Madonna: she
had seen Fabrizio so often by candle-light, and indeed twice in broad
daylight and with such rapturous affection, during Sandrino's illness.
She survived by a few months only this beloved son, but had the joy of
dying in the arms of her lover.
Fabrizio was too much in love and too religious to have recourse to
suicide; he hoped to meet Clelia again in a better world, but he had too
much intelligence not to feel that he had first to atone for many
faults.
A few days after Clelia's death, he signed several settlements by which
he assured a pension of one thousand francs to each of his servants, and
reserved a similar pension for himself; he gave landed property, of an
annual value of 100,000 lire or thereabouts, to Contessa Mosca; a
similar estate to the Marchesa del Dongo, his mother, and such residue
as there might be of the paternal fortune to one of his sisters who was
poorly married. On the following day, having forwarded to the proper
authorities his resignation of his Archbishopric and of all the posts
which the favour of Ernesto V and the Prime Minister's friendship had
successively heaped upon him, he retired to the _Charterhouse of Parma_,
situated in the woods adjoining the Po, two leagues from Sacca.
_GINA DEL DONGO_
Contessa Mosca had strongly approved, at the time, her husband's return
to office, but she herself would never on any account consent to cross
the frontier of the States of Ernesto V. She held her court at Vignano,
a quarter of a league from Casalmaggiore, on the left bank of the Po,
and consequently in the Austrian States. In this magnificent palace of
Vignano, which the Conte had built for her, she entertained every
Thursday all the high society of Parma, and every day her own many
friends. Fabrizio had never missed a day in going to Vignano. The
Contessa, in a word, combined all the outward appearances of happiness,
but she lived for a very short time only after Fabrizio, whom she
adored, and who spent but one year in his Charterhouse.
The prisons of Parma were empty, the Conte immensely rich, Ernesto V
adored by his subjects, who compared his rule to that of the Grand Dukes
of Tuscany.