Then, to increase still further the desperation of this rich man, with
his income of two hundred thousand lire, she _ginginates_ (_ginginare_
is a Milanese verb meaning everything that passes at a distance between
a pair of lovers before they have spoken; the verb has its noun: one is
a _gingino_. It is the first stage in love). Well, she ginginates for a
moment with a fool whom she soon abandons; then she retires, with a
pension of fifteen hundred francs, to a third floor apartment where all
Milan of the day comes to see her and admires her.
Her brother, the Marchese, invites her to return to the ancestral castle
on the Lake of Como. She goes there, to see once more and to protect her
charming nephew, Fabrizio, to comfort her sister-in-law and to plan her
own future amid the sublime scenery of the Lake of Como, her native soil
and the native soil of this nephew whom she has made her son: she has no
children. Fabrizio, who loves Napoleon, learns of his landing from the
Gulf of Juan and wishes to go to serve the sovereign of his uncle
Pietranera. His mother, who, the wife of a rich Marchese with an income
of five hundred thousand lire, has not a penny to call her own, his aunt
Gina, who has nothing, give him their diamonds: Fabrizio is in their
eyes a hero.
The inspired volunteer crosses Switzerland, arrives in Paris, takes part
in the battle of Waterloo, then returns to Italy, where, for having
dabbled in the conspiracy of 1815 against the peace of Europe, he is
disowned by his father and the Austrian government place him on their
index. For him, to return to Milan would be to enter the Spielberg. From
this point Fabrizio, in trouble, persecuted for his heroism, this
sublime boy becomes everything in the world to Gina.
The Contessa returns to Milan, she obtains a promise from Bubna and from
the men of character whom Austria at this period has put in authority
there, not to persecute Fabrizio, whom, following the advice of an
extremely shrewd Canon, she keeps in concealment at Novara. Meanwhile,
with all these things happening, no money. But Gina is of a sublime
beauty, she is the type of that Lombard beauty (_bellezza folgorante_)
which can be realised only at Milan and in the Scala when you see
assembled there the thousand beautiful women of Lombardy. The events of
this troubled life have developed in her the most magnificent Italian
character: she has intellect, shrewdness, the Italian grace, the most
charming conversation, an astonishing command of herself; in short, the
Contessa is at one and the same time Madame de Montespan, Catherine de'
Medici, Catherine II, too, if you like: the most audacious political
genius and the most consummate feminine genius, hidden beneath a
marvellous beauty. Having watched over her nephew, despite the hatred of
the elder brother who is jealous of him, despite the hatred and
indifference of the father, having snatched him from these perils,
having been one of the queens of the court of the Viceroy Eugène, and
then nothing; all these crises have enriched her natural forces,
exercised her faculties and awakened the instincts numbed in the depths
of her being by her early prosperity, by a marriage the joys of which
have been rare, owing to the continual absence of Napoleon's devoted
servant. Everyone sees or can divine in her the thousand treasures of
passion, the resources and the refulgence of the most perfect feminine
heart.
The old Canon, whom she has seduced, sends Fabrizio to Novara, a small
town in Piedmont, under the tutelage of a parish priest. This priest
puts a step to the inquiries of the police by his description of
Fabrizio: "a younger son who feels wronged because he is not the
eldest." When Gina, who had dreamed of Fabrizio's becoming aide-de-camp
to Napoleon, sees Napoleon banished to St. Helena, she realises that
Fabrizio, his name inscribed in the black book of the Milanese police,
is lost to her for ever.
During the uncertainties which prevailed throughout Europe at the time
of the battle of Waterloo, Gina has made the acquaintance of Conte Mosca
della Rovere, the Minister of the famous Prince of Parma,
Ranuccio-Ernesto IV.
Let us pause at this point.
Certainly, after having read the book, it is impossible not to
recognise, in Conte Mosca, the most remarkable portrait that anyone
could ever make of Prince Metternich, but of a Metternich transported
from the great Chancellory of the Austrian Empire to the modest State of
Parma. The State of Parma and Ernesto IV seem to me similarly to be the
Duke of Modena and his Duchy. M. Beyle says of Ernesto IV that he is one
of the richest Princes in Europe: the wealth of the Duke of Modena is
famous. In seeking to avoid personalities the author has expended more
ingenuity than Walter Scott required to construct the plot of
Kenilworth. Indeed, these two similarities are vague enough, outwardly,
to be denied, and so real inwardly that the well-informed reader cannot
be mistaken. M. Beyle has so exalted the sublime character of the Prime
Minister of the State of Parma that it is doubtful whether Prince
Metternich be so great a man as Mosca, although the heart of that
celebrated statesman does offer, to those who know his life well, one or
two examples of passions of a compass at least equal to that of Mosca's.
It is not slandering the Austrian Minister to believe him capable of all
the secret greatnesses of Mosca. As for what Mosca is throughout the
book, as for the conduct of the man whom Gina regards as the greatest
diplomat in Italy, it took genius to create the incidents, the events
and the innumerable and recurring plots in the midst of which this
immense character unfolds. All that M. de Metternich has done during his
long career is not more extraordinary than what you see done by Mosca.
When one comes to think that the author has invented it all, ravelled
all the plot and then unravelled it, as things do ravel and unravel
themselves at a court, the most daring mind, a mind to which the
conception of ideas is a familiar process, is left dazed, stupefied
before so huge a task. As for myself, I suspect some literary
Aladdin's-lamp. To have dared to put on the stage a man of the genius
and force of M. de Choiseul, Potemkin, M. de Metternich, to create him,
to justify the creation by the actions of the creature himself, to make
him move in an environment which is appropriate to him and in which his
faculties have full play, is the work not of a man but of a fairy, a
wizard. Bear in mind that the most skilfully complicated plots of Walter
Scott do not arrive at the admirable simplicity which prevails in the
recital of these events, so numerous, so _thickly foliaged_, to borrow
the famous expression of Diderot.
Here is the portrait of Mosca. We are in 1816, remember.
"He might have been forty or forty-five: he had strongly marked
features, with no trace of self-importance, and a simple and
light-hearted manner which told in his favour; he would have looked very
well indeed, if a whim on the part of his Prince had not obliged him to
wear powder on his hair as a proof of his soundness in politics."
And so the powder which M. de Metternich wears, and which softens a face
already so gentle, is justified in Mosca by the will of his master. In
spite of the prodigious efforts of M. Beyle, who, on page after page,
naturalises in this State marvellous inventions to deceive his reader
and blunt the point of his allusions, the mind is at Modena and will on
no account consent to remain at Parma. Whoever has seen, known, met M.
de Metternich, thinks that he hears him speaking through the mouth of
Mosca, lends Mosca his voice and clothes him in his manners. Although,
in the book, Ernesto IV dies, and the Duke of Modena is still living,
one is often reminded of that Prince _so notorious for his severities_,
_which the Liberals of Milan called cruelties_. Such are the expressions
used by the author in speaking of the Prince of Parma.
In these two portraits, begun with a satirical intention, there is,
however, nothing that can wound, nothing that reeks of vengeance.
Although M. Beyle has no cause to thank M. de Metternich, who refused
him his _exequatur_ for the Trieste Consulate, and although the Duke of
Modena has never been able to look with pleasure on the author of _Rome,
Naples et Florence_, of the _Promenades en Rome_, and of certain other
works, these two figures are portrayed with great taste and the utmost
propriety.
This is what, no doubt, occurred during the actual work of these two
creations. Carried away by the enthusiasm necessary to him who handles
clay and scalpel, the brush and colours, the pen and the treasures of
man's moral nature, M. Beyle, who had started out to depict a little
court in Italy and a diplomat, ended with the type PRINCE and the type
PRIME MINISTER. The resemblance, began with the fantasy of a satirical
mind, ceased where the genius of the arts appeared to the artist.
This convention of masks once admitted, the reader, keenly interested,
accepts the admirable Italian scene which the author paints, the town
and all the buildings necessary to his story, which, in many places, has
the magical quality of an Oriental tale.
This long parenthesis was indispensable. Let us continue.
Mosca is smitten with love, but with a love immense, eternal, boundless,
for Gina, absolutely like M. de Metternich and his Leykam. He lets her,
at the risk of compromising himself, have the latest diplomatic news
before anyone else. The presence at Milan of this Minister of the State
of Parma is perfectly accounted for later on.
To give you an idea of this famous Italian love, I must relate to you a
distinctly curious incident. On their departure, in 1799, the Austrians
saw as they left Milan, on the Bastion, a certain Contessa B----nini who
was driving with a Canon, both heedless of revolutions and war: they
were in love. The Bastion is a magnificent avenue which starts from the
Eastern Gate (Porta Renza) and corresponds to the Champs-Elysées in
Paris, with this slight difference that on the left extends the Duomo,
"that mountain of gold transmuted into marble," as Francis II, who had a
gift of expression, called it; and on the right the snowy fringe, the
sublime chasms of the Alps. On their return in 1814 the first thing the
Austrians saw was the Contessa and the Canon, sitting in the same
carriage and saying, perhaps, the same things, at the same point on the
Bastion. I have seen, in that city, a young man who became ill if he
went more than a certain number of streets away from the house of his
mistress. When a woman gives an Italian sensations, he never leaves her.
"In spite of his frivolous air and his polished manners. Mosca," says M.
Beyle, "was not blessed with a soul of the French type; he could not
_forget_ the things that annoyed him. When there was a thorn in his
pillow, he would blunt it by repeated stabbings of his throbbing limbs."
This superior man guesses the superior mind of the Contessa, he falls in
love with her to the point of behaving like a schoolboy.
"After all," the Minister said to himself, "old age is only being
incapable of indulging in these delicious timidities."
The Contessa one evening remarks the fine, benevolent gaze of Mosca.
(The gaze with which M. de Metternich would deceive the Deity.)
"At Parma," she says to him, "if you were to look like that, you would
give them the hope that they might escape hanging."
In the end the diplomat, having realised how essential this woman is to
his happiness, and after three months of inward struggle, arrives with
three different plans, devised to secure his happiness, and makes her
agree to the wisest of them.
In Mosca's eyes, Fabrizio is a child: the excessive interest which the
Contessa takes in her nephew seems to him one of those elective
maternities which, until love comes to reign there, beguile the hearts
of noble-hearted women.
Mosca, unfortunately, is married. Accordingly he brings to Milan the
Duca Sanseverina-Taxis. Let me, in this analysis, introduce a few
quotations which will give you examples of the vivid, free, sometimes
faulty style of M. Beyle, and will enable me to make myself be read with
pleasure.
The Duca is a handsome little old man of sixty-eight, dapple-grey, very
polished, very neat, immensely rich, but not quite as noble as he ought
to have been. Apart from this, the Duca is by no means an absolute
idiot, says the Conte: "he gets his clothes and wigs from Paris. He is
not the sort of man who would do anything _deliberately_ mean, he
seriously believes that honour consists in having a Grand Cordon, and he
is ashamed of his riches. He wants an Embassy. Marry him, he will give
you a hundred thousand scudi, a magnificent jointure, his _palazzo_ and
the most superb existence in Parma. On these conditions, I make the
Prince appoint him Ambassador, he will have his Grand Cordon, and he
will start the day after his marriage; you become Duchessa Sanseverina,
and we live happily. Everything is settled with the Duca, who will be
made the happiest man in the world by our arrangement: he will never
shew his face again in Parma. If this life does not appeal to you, I
have four hundred thousand francs, I hand in my resignation and we go
and live at Naples."
"Do you know that what you and your Duca are proposing is highly
immoral?" says the Contessa.
"No more immoral than what is done at every court," the Minister
answers. "Absolute Power has this advantage, that it justifies
everything. Every year we shall be afraid of a 1798, and everything that
can reduce that fear will be supremely moral. You shall hear the
speeches I make on the subject at my receptions. The Prince has
consented, and you will have a brother in the Duca, who has not dared to
hope for such a marriage, which saves his face; he thinks himself ruined
because he lent twenty-five napoleons to the great Ferrante Palla, a
Republican, a poet and something of a genius, whom we have sentenced to
death, fortunately in his absence."
Gina accepts. We next see her Duchessa Sanseverina-Taxis, astonishing
the court of Parma by her affability, by the noble serenity of her mind.
Her house is the most attractive in the town, she reigns there, she is
the glory of this little court.
The portrait of Ernesto IV, his reception of the Duchessa, her
introduction to each member in turn of the Reigning House, all these
details are marvels of wit, depth, succinctness. Never have the hearts
of Princes, Ministers, courtiers and women been so depicted. The reader
will find it hard to lay the book down.
When the Duchessa's nephew fled from Austrian persecution and was on his
way from the Lake of Como to Novara under the protection of his
confessor and the parish priest, he met Fabio Conti, General of the
Armies of the State of Parma, one of the most curious figures of this
court and of the book, a general who thinks of nothing but whether His
Highness's soldiers ought to have seven buttons on their uniform or
nine; but this comic general possesses an entrancing daughter, Clelia
Conti. Fabrizio and Clelia, both trying to escape from the police, have
exchanged a few words. Clelia is the most beautiful creature in Parma.
As soon as the Prince sees the effect produced in his court by the
Sanseverina, he thinks of counter-balancing that beauty by bringing
Clelia to light. A great difficulty! Girls are not received at court: he
therefore has her created a Canoness.
The Prince has of course a mistress. One of his weaknesses is to ape
Louis XIV. So, to be in the picture, he has provided himself with a La
Vallière, one Contessa Balbi, who dips her fingers into every
money-bag, and is not forgotten when any government contract is made.
Ernesto IV would be in despair if the Balbi were not slightly grasping:
the scandalous fortune of his mistress is a sign of royal power. He is
lucky, the Contessa is a miser!
"She received me," the Duchessa tells Mosca, "as though she expected me
to give her a _buona mancia_ (a tip)."
But, to the great grief of Ernesto IV, the Contessa, who has no brains,
cannot be compared for a moment to the Duchessa; this humiliates him, a
first source of irritation. His mistress is thirty, and a model of
Italian _leggiadria_.
She had still the finest eyes in the world and the most graceful little
hands;[1] but her skin was netted with countless fine little wrinkles
which made her look like a young grandmother. As she was obliged to
smile at everything the Prince said, and sought to make him think, by
this ironical smile, that she understood him, Conte Mosca used to say
that these suppressed yawns had in course of time produced her wrinkles.
The Duchessa parries the first blow aimed at her by His Highness by
making a friend of Clelia, who, fortunately, is an innocent creature.
From motives of policy, the Prince allows to exist at Parma a sort of
Party, called Liberal (God knows what sort of Liberals!). A Liberal is a
man who has the great men of Italy, Dante, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Leo X
painted welcoming Monti on a ceiling. This passes as an epigram against
the power which has no longer any great men. This Liberal Party has as
its chief a Marchesa Raversi, an ugly and mischievous woman, as
irritating as an Opposition. Fabio Conti, the General, belongs to this
Party. The Prince, who hangs agitators, has his reasons for allowing a
Liberal Party.
Ernesto IV rejoices in a Laubardemont, his Fiscal General or Chief
Justice, named Rassi. This Rassi, full of natural intelligence, is one
of the most horribly comic or comically horrible personages that can be
imagined: he laughs and has people hanged, he makes a game of his
justice. He is necessary, indispensable to the Prince. Rassi is a blend
of Fouché, Fouquier-Tinville, Merlin, Triboulet and Scapin. You call
the Prince a _tyrant_: he says that this is conspiracy and he hangs you.
He has already hanged two Liberals. Since this execution, notorious
throughout Italy, the Prince, who is brave when on the field of battle
and has led armies, the Prince, though a man of spirit, lives in fear.
This Rassi becomes something terrible, he attains to gigantic
proportions while still remaining grotesque: he embodies all the justice
of this little State.
And now for the inevitable effects at court of the Duchessa's triumphs.
The Conte and the Duchessa, that pair of eagles caged in this tiny
capital, soon begin to offend the Prince. In the first place the
Duchessa is sincerely attached to the Conte, the Conte is more in love
every day, and this happiness irritates a bored Prince. Mosca's talents
are indispensable to the Cabinet of Parma. Ranuccio-Ernesto and his
Minister are attached to one another like the Siamese twins. Indeed,
they have between them contrived the impossible plan ("impossible" is a
rhetorical precaution on M. Beyle's part) of making a single State of
Northern Italy. Beneath his mask of absolutism, the Prince is intriguing
to become the Sovereign of this Constitutional Kingdom. He is dying of
envy to ape Louis XVIII, to give a Charter and Two Chamber government to
Northern Italy. He regards himself as a great politician, he has his
ambition: he redeems in his own eyes his subordinate position by this
plan with which Mosca is fully acquainted; he has control of his
treasury! The more need he has of Mosca and the more he recognises his
Minister's talent, the more reasons there are in the depths of this
princely heart for an unconfessed jealousy. Life at court is boring, at
the _palazzo_ Sanseverina it is amusing. What means remain to him of
demonstrating his power to himself? The chance of tormenting his
Minister. And he torments him cruelly! The Prince tries first of all, in
a friendly way, to secure the Duchessa as his mistress, she refuses;
there are blows to self-esteem the elements of which may easily be
guessed from this brief analysis. Presently, the Prince reaches the
stage of wishing to attack his Minister through the Duchessa, and he
then seeks out ways of making her suffer.
All this part of the novel is of a remarkable literary solidity. This
painting has the magnitude of a canvas fifty feet by thirty, and at the
same time the manner, the execution is Dutch in its minuteness. We come
to the drama, and to a drama the most complete, the most gripping, the
strangest, the truest, the most profoundly explored in the human heart
that has ever been invented, but one that has existed, undoubtedly, at
many periods, and will reappear at courts where it will be enacted
again, as Louis XIII and Richelieu, as Francis II and Prince Metternich,
as Louis XV, the du Barry and M. de Choiseul have enacted it in the
past.
The prospect which, in this new setting, has most attracted the Duchessa
is that of the possibility of making a career for her hero, for this
child of her heart, for Fabrizio her nephew. Fabrizio will owe his
fortune to the genius of Mosca. The love which she has conceived for the
child she continues to feel for the youth. I may tell you now,
beforehand, that this love is to become later on, at first without
Gina's knowledge, then consciously, a passion that will reach the
sublime. Nevertheless she will always be the wife of the great diplomat,
to whom she will never have committed any other act of infidelity than
that of the passionate impulses of her heart towards this young idol;
she will not deceive this man of genius, she will always make him happy
and proud; she will make him aware of her least emotions, he will endure
the most horrible rages of jealousy, and will never have any grounds for
complaint. The Duchessa will be frank, artless, sublime, resigned,
moving as a play of Shakespeare, beautiful as poetry, and the most
severe reader will have no fault to find. I doubt if any poet has ever
solved such a problem with as much felicity as has M. Beyle in this bold
work. The Duchessa is one of those magnificent statues which make us at
once admire the art that created them and inveigh against Nature which
is so sparing of such models. Gina, when you have read the book, will
remain before your eyes like a sublime statue: it will be neither the
Venus de Milo, nor the Venus de' Medici; it will be Diana with the
voluptuousness of Venus, with the suavity of Raphael's Virgins, and the
movement of Italian passion. Above all, there is nothing French in the
Duchessa. Yes, the Frenchman who has modelled, chiselled, wrought this
marble, has left nothing on it of his native soil. _Corinne_, you must
realise, is a miserable sketch compared with this living, ravishing
creature. You will find her great, intellectual, passionate, always true
to life, and yet the author has carefully concealed her sensual aspect.
There is not in the work a single word that can make one think of the
pleasures of love or can inspire them. Although the Duchessa, Mosca,
Fabrizio, the Prince and his son, Clelia, although the book and its
characters are, in their different ways, passion with all its furies;
although it is Italy as it is, with its shrewdness, its dissimulation,
its cunning, its coolness, its tenacity, its higher policy in every
connexion. _La Chartreuse de Parme_ is more chaste than the most
puritanical of the novels of Walter Scott. To make a noble, majestic,
almost irreproachable character of a duchess who makes a Mosca happy,
and keeps nothing from him, is not that a masterpiece of fiction? The
_Phèdre_ of Racine, that sublime creation of the French stage, which
Jansenism did not venture to condemn, is not so beautiful, nor so
complete, nor so animated.
Well, at the moment when everything is smiling on the Duchessa, when she
is amusing herself with this court life where a sudden storm is always
to be feared, when she is most tenderly attached to the Conte, who,
literally, is mad with happiness; when he has the patent and receives
the honours of Prime Minister _which come very near to those paid to the
Sovereign himself_, she says to him one day:
"And Fabrizio?"
The Conte then offers to obtain for her, from Austria, a pardon for this
dear nephew.
"But, if he is somewhat superior to the young men who ride their English
thoroughbreds about the streets of Milan, what a life, at eighteen, to
be doing nothing with no prospect of ever having anything to do! If,"
says Mosca, "heaven had endowed him with a real passion, were it only
for angling, I should respect it; but what is he to do at Milan, even
after he has obtained his pardon?"
"I should like him to be an officer," says the Duchessa.
"Would you advise a Sovereign," says Mosca, "to entrust a post which, at
a given date, may be of some importance, to a young man who has shown
enthusiasm, who, from Como, has gone to join Napoleon at Waterloo? A del
Dongo cannot be a merchant, nor a barrister, nor a doctor. You will cry
out in protest, but you will come in the end to agree with me. If
Fabrizio wishes it, he can quickly become Archbishop of Parma, one of
the highest dignities in Italy, and from that Cardinal. We have had at
Parma three del Dongo Archbishops, the Cardinal who wrote a book in
sixteen-something, Fabrizio in 1700 and Ascanio in 1750. Only, shall I
remain Minister long enough? That is the sole objection."
After two months spent in discussion, the Duchessa, defeated on every
point by the Conte's observations, and rendered desperate by the
precarious position of a younger son of a Milanese family, utters one
day this profound Italian saying to her friend:
"Prove to me again that every other career is impossible for Fabrizio."
The Conte proves it.
The Duchessa, susceptible to the thought of fame, sees no other way of
salvation, here below, for her dear Fabrizio, than the Church and its
high dignities, for the future of Italy lies in Rome, and nowhere else.
To anyone who has studied Italy carefully, it is clear that the unity of
government in that country, that its nationality will never be
re-established save by the hand of a Sixtus V. The Pope alone has the
power to stir and to reconstitute Italy. And so we see with what pains
the Austrian court has watched, for the last thirty years, the elections
of Popes, what aged imbeciles she has allowed to don the Triple Crown.
"Perish Catholicism sooner than my domination!" seems to be her guiding
motto. Miserly Austria would spend a million to prevent the election of
a Pope with French ideas. And then, if some fine Italian genius employed
sufficient dissimulation to put on the white cassock, he might die like
Ganganelli. There perhaps is to be found the secret of the refusals of
the Court of Rome, which has not chosen to accept the invigorating
potion, the elixir offered to it by men of fine ecclesiastical genius
from France: Borgia would not have failed to make them take their seat
among his devoted Cardinals. The author of the Bull _In coena Domini_
would have understood the great Gallican idea, Catholic Democracy, he
would have adapted it to the circumstances. M. de Lamennais, that fallen
angel, would not then, in his Breton obstinacy, have abandoned the
Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church.
So the Duchessa adopts this plan of the Conte. In this great woman there
is, as in great politicians, a moment of uncertainty, of hesitation
before a plan; but she never goes back upon her resolutions. The
Duchessa is always right in wishing what she has wished. Her
persistency, that strong quality of her imperious character, imparts an
element of terror to all the scenes of this fertile drama.
Nothing could be more clever than the initiation of Fabrizio into his
future destiny. The lovers display to Fabrizio the chances of his life.
Fabrizio, a boy of astonishing intelligence, grasps everything at once
and has a vision of the tiara. The Conte does not pretend to make a
priest of him of the sort one sees everywhere in Italy. Fabrizio is a
great gentleman, he can remain perfectly ignorant if it seems good to
him, and will none the less become Archbishop. Fabrizio refuses to lead
the life of the caffè, he has a horror of poverty, and realises that he
cannot be a soldier. When he speaks of going and becoming an American
citizen (we are in 1817), he has explained to him the dulness of life in
America, without smartness, without music, without love affairs, without
war, the cult of the god Dollar, and the respect due to artisans, to the
masses who by their votes decide everything. Fabrizio has a horror of
_mobocracy_.
At the voice of the great diplomat, who shows him life as it really is,
the young man's illusions take flight. He had not understood what is
incomprehensible to young people, the "_Surtout pas de zèle_!" of M. de
Talleyrand.
"Remember," Mosca says to him, "that a proclamation, a caprice of the
heart flings the enthusiast into the bosom of the party opposed to his
own future sympathies."