Read The Charterhouse of Parma Online
Authors: Stendhal
The Charterhouse of Parma (59 page)
The Count had reopened his letter to add:
Now for a very different business: I have just had cartridges distributed to two battalions of the Guard; I shall do battle and deserve as best I can that sobriquet “the Cruel” with which the Liberals have honored me for so long. That old mummy General P—— has dared to speak in the barracks of parleying with the people, who are more or less in rebellion. I write you from the middle of the street; now I’m going to the Palace, which shall be entered only over my dead body. Farewell! If I die, it will be as your votary, even as I have lived! Don’t forget to take the three hundred thousand francs left in your name at the banker D——’s, in Lyons.
Here is that poor devil Rassi, pale as death and without his wig; you can’t imagine what he looks like! The people are determined to hang him, which would be doing him a great wrong, he deserves to be drawn and quartered. He sought refuge in my
palazzo
, and has run after me into the street; I’m not sure what to do with him.… I don’t want to lead him to the Prince’s Palace, which would cause the rebellion to break out there. F—— will see how much I love him; my first word to Rassi was: I must
have the sentence of Signor del Dongo, and all the copies of it you can obtain, and I want you to inform all those iniquitous judges who are the cause of this rebellion that I’ll have them all hanged, like yourself, my dear friend, if they breathe a word of this sentence, which has never existed. In Fabrizio’s name, I’m sending a company of grenadiers to the Archbishop. Fare-well, my angel! My
palazzo
will be burned to the ground and I shall lose my charming portraits of you. I’m off to the Palace to strip that wretched General P—— of his rank, who is up to his usual tricks; he is basely flattering the populace, as he used to flatter the late Prince. All these generals are scared out of their wits; I believe I shall have myself made Commander in Chief.
The Duchess was unkind enough not to have Fabrizio wakened; she felt a burst of admiration for the Count which closely resembled love. “All things considered,” she said to herself, “I must marry him.” She wrote him immediately, and sent one of her men with the letter. That night, the Duchess had no time to be unhappy.
The next day, around noon, she saw a boat manned by ten oarsmen rapidly cleaving the waters of the lake; she and Fabrizio soon recognized a man wearing the livery of the Prince of Parma: indeed this was one of his couriers, who, before disembarking, shouted to the Duchess: “The rebellion has been put down!”
This courier handed her several letters from the Count, an admirable communication from the Princess, and a decree of Prince Ranuccio-Ernesto V, on parchment, which created her Duchess of San Giovanni and Mistress of the Robes of the Dowager Princess. This young Prince, so learned in mineralogy and whom she had supposed an imbecile, had possessed sufficient wit to write her a brief note; but there was love at the end of it. The note began as follows:
The Count tells me, Signora Duchess, that he is pleased with me; the fact is that I have withstood a few rifle shots beside him, and that my horse was grazed: considering the fuss made over such trifles, I am particularly eager to participate in a real battle, but not one against my own subjects. I owe everything to the Count; all my generals, who have no experience of warfare, behaved like so many hares; I believe that two or three have fled as far
as Bologna. Since a great and deplorable event has put me in power, I have signed no decree which has been so agreeable to me as the one which appoints you my mother’s Mistress of the Robes. My mother and I well recall that one day you admired the fine view to be had from the
palazzetto
of San Giovanni, which once belonged to Petrarch, or so it is said; my mother has desired to present you with this little estate; and I, uncertain what to give you, and not daring to offer all that belongs to you—I have made you Duchess in my country; I do not know if you are so learned as to know that Sanseverina is a Roman title. I have just awarded the Grand Cordon of my Order to our worthy Archbishop, who has shown a resolve rare in men of seventy. You will not disapprove my having recalled all the ladies who were banished. I am told that I must no longer sign my name without having written the words
your affectionate
: I am vexed that I must lavish assurances which are not quite true except when I write you.
Your affectionate
Ranuccio-Ernesto
Who would not have said, judging from this language, that the Duchess was to enjoy the highest favor? Yet she found something quite odd in other letters from the Count, which she received two hours later.
Without offering any further explanation, he advised her to postpone her return to Parma for several days, and to write to the Princess that she was quite unwell. Nonetheless, the Duchess and Fabrizio left for Parma immediately after dinner. The Duchess’s purpose, which she still did not acknowledge, was to hasten the Marchese Crescenzi’s marriage; Fabrizio, for his part, made the journey in transports of wild joy, which seemed quite absurd to his aunt. He had hopes of seeing Clélia again soon; and was counting on carrying her off, even against her will, if that were to be the only means of breaking off this marriage.
The journey of the Duchess and her nephew was very gay. At the posting station before Parma, Fabrizio stopped a moment in order to change into his ecclesiastical habit; ordinarily he was dressed in mourning. When he came into the Duchess’s room, she said to him: “I find something inexplicable and rather sinister in the Count’s letters. If
you want my advice, you’ll spend a few hours here. I’ll send you a courier once I’ve spoken to that great Minister.”
It was with great reluctance that Fabrizio followed this reasonable advice. Transports of joy worthy of a boy of fifteen marked the reception the Count gave to the Duchess, whom he addressed as his wife. It was some time before he was willing to talk politics, and when at last he did, they discovered the sad reason for this:
“You were quite right to keep Fabrizio from arriving officially; we are in the grip of reaction here. Can you guess the colleague the Prince has bequeathed me as Minister of Justice? It’s Rassi, my dear, Rassi, whom I’ve treated as the ruffian that he is, on the day of our grand adventure. By the way, I must inform you that everything that has taken place here has been suppressed. If you read our gazette, you will see that a clerk of the Fortress, one Barbone, has died from a fall from a carriage. As for the sixty-some rascals I had shot, when they attacked the Prince’s statue in the gardens, they are enjoying the best of health, but happen to be traveling abroad. Count Zurla, Minister of the Interior, has himself gone to the residence of each of these unfortunate heroes, and has bestowed fifteen sequins to their families or to their friends, with orders to say that the deceased is traveling, and threatens a term in prison if any mention is made that the man was shot. A man in my own Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been sent on a mission to the journalists of Milan and Turin so that no mention will be made of the
unfortunate event
, which is the consecrated phrase; this fellow will push on to Paris and London, in order to place a denial in every newspaper, semi-officially, of anything that might be said of our troubles. Another agent has headed for Bologna and Florence. I merely shrugged my shoulders.
“But the amusing thing, at my age, is that I have experienced a moment of enthusiasm in speaking to the soldiers of the Guard and in ripping the epaulettes from that booby General P——. At that moment I would have given my life, without a qualm, for the Prince; I now confess that it would have been a very stupid way of ending it. Today, the Prince, fine young man that he is, would give a hundred scudi for me to die of some disease; he does not yet dare ask me to resign, but we speak to each other as seldom as possible, and I am sending
a quantity of little reports in writing, as I did with the late Prince, after Fabrizio’s imprisonment. Apropos, I have not yet torn up the sentence signed against him, for the good reason that our scoundrel Rassi has not yet given it back to me. So you did the right thing to keep Fabrizio from arriving here officially. The sentence is still in effect; though I don’t believe that Rassi would dare to have your nephew arrested now, it is still possible that he will do so in a fortnight. If Fabrizio insists on returning to the city, let him come and stay with me.”
“But what is the reason for all this?” exclaimed the Duchess in amazement.
“The Prince has been convinced that I am giving myself the airs of a dictator and a savior of the fatherland, and that I want to lead him about like a child; furthermore, in alluding to him, I am reported to have pronounced the fatal word: this
child
. Which may be quite true, I was overexcited that day: for instance, I saw him as a great man because he wasn’t too frightened at the first gunshots he had ever heard in his life. He’s not entirely without brains, he certainly has a better style than his father: in short, I can’t say it too often, his heart is sound; but this sound young heart hardens when someone tells him of a nasty trick and he imagines that one must have a very dark soul himself to realize such things: consider the education he has been given …!”
“Your Excellency should have realized that one day he would be master here, and put an intelligent man at his side.”
“First of all, we have the example of the Abbé de Condillac, who when summoned by the Marchese di Felino, my predecessor, made his pupil nothing better than a King of Simpletons. He walked in the processions and, in 1796, he failed to come to terms with General Bonaparte, who had tripled the area of his States. In the second place, I have never believed I would remain Minister for ten years in succession. Now that I am entirely without illusions, and this for the last month, I want to amass a million, before leaving to its own devices this bedlam I have rescued. Without me, Parma would have been a republic for the last two months, with the poet Ferrante Palla as its dictator.”
At this the Duchess blushed. The Count knew nothing of what had happened.
“We’re going to revert to the typical eighteenth-century Monarchy:
the confessor and the mistress. At heart, the Prince cares for nothing but mineralogy and perhaps for you, Madame. Since he has been in power, his valet, whose brother I happened to have promoted to captain nine months ago—this valet, I repeat, has managed to put it into the Prince’s head that he should be happier than other men because his profile appears on the coinage. This fine idea has been followed by a certain amount of boredom.
“Now he requires an aide-de-camp to conjure away his boredom. Well, even if he were to offer me that famous million we require to live decently in Naples or Paris, I would not be his remedy for boredom and spend four or five hours every day with His Highness. Moreover, since I have more brains than he, at the end of a month he would take me for a monster.
“The late Prince was a wicked and envious man, but he had fought in battle and commanded an army corps, which gave him a certain bearing; he was regarded as having the substance of a Prince, and I could be his Minister, for better or worse. With this decent fellow of a son, truthful and truly kind-hearted, I am compelled to be an intriguer. Here I am the rival of the most insignificant little woman in the Palace, and indeed a very inferior rival, for I should despise a hundred necessary details. For instance, three days ago, one of those women who puts clean towels in the rooms every morning took it into her head to make the Prince lose the key to one of his English desks. Whereupon His Highness refused to concern himself with all the business dealt with by the papers that happened to be in that desk; now, for twenty francs you can have the boards removed from the bottom of the desk, or else use skeleton keys; but Ranuccio-Ernesto V told me that would be to inculcate bad habits in our Court locksmith.
“Hitherto it has been quite impossible for him to retain the same opinion for three days running. Had he been born Signor Marchese So-and-so, with a certain fortune, this young Prince would have been one of the most estimable men of his court, a sort of Louis XVI; but now, with all his pious naïveté, how can he resist the various cunning traps that surround him? And the salon of your enemy the Raversi is more powerful than ever; the discovery has been made there that I— I who gave orders to fire on the populace and who was resolved to kill
three thousand men if necessary rather than to let the statue of the Prince who had been my master be desecrated—I am a raging Liberal, that I wanted him to sign a Constitution, and a thousand such absurdities. With such notions of a Republic, the madmen would keep us from enjoying the best of all possible Monarchies.… In short, Signora, you are the only member of the present Liberal party of which my enemies account me the leader, on whose account the Prince has not expressed himself in offensive terms; the Archbishop, still an entirely honest man, having spoken in reasonable terms of what I have done
on that unhappy day
, is in deep disgrace.
“The day after the day which was not yet called
unhappy
, when it was still true that the rebellion existed, the Prince remarked to the Archbishop that, in order to spare you assuming an inferior title in marrying me, he would make me a Duke. Today I believe that it is Rassi, ennobled by me when he was selling me the secrets of the late Prince, who is to be made a Count. In the face of such a promotion, I should cut a poor figure.”
“And the poor Prince a worse one.”
“No doubt: but ultimately he is the
master
here, a circumstance which in less than fifteen days causes
absurdity
to vanish. And so, dear Duchess, let us proceed as in the game of backgammon:
let us withdraw.
”
“But we shall be anything but rich.”
“As it happens, neither of us has any great need of luxury. If you give me, in Naples, a seat in a box at the San Carlo and a horse, I am more than satisfied; it will never be wealth which will afford the two of us our due, but rather the pleasure which the intelligent souls of wherever we may be will take in coming to you for a cup of tea.”