Read The Charterhouse of Parma Online
Authors: Stendhal
The Charterhouse of Parma (30 page)
As a matter of fact they were scarcely thicker than a quill pen, and less than a foot long.
“How many more candles will fit on your triangle?”
“Sixty-three, since there are seven lighted.”
“Ah!” Fabrizio said to himself. “Sixty-three and seven make seventy: I should take note of that as well.” He paid for the candles, placed and lighted the first seven himself, then knelt to make his offering and, as he rose, said to the old woman: “It’s
for Grace received.
”
“I’m dying of hunger,” Fabrizio said to Ludovic as he joined him.
“Let’s not go to some tavern, we’ll go back to our lodgings; the woman there will buy you what we need for a meal; she’ll steal twenty sous and will be all the fonder of the new arrival.”
“That merely means I’ll have to go on dying of hunger for a good hour longer,” Fabrizio said with the laughing serenity of a child, and he went into a tavern near San Petronio.
To his immense surprise, he saw, at a table close to the one where he had been placed, Pepe, his aunt’s first footman, the very man who had once come to meet him in Geneva. Fabrizio made a sign that he should say nothing; then, after a rapid meal, a happy smile stealing over his lips, he stood up; Pepe followed him, and for the third time our hero entered San Petronio. Out of discretion, Ludovic remained walking back and forth in the square.
“Well, my Lord, Monsignore! How are your wounds? Her Grace the Duchess is dreadfully worried; for a whole day she thought you
were lying dead on some island in the Po; I’ll go and send her a message right away. I’ve been looking for you the last six days; I’ve spent three in Ferrara running from one inn to the next.”
“Have you a passport for me?”
“I have three different ones: one with the names and titles of Your Excellency; the second with just your name, and the third made out in an assumed name, Joseph Bossi; each passport is issued in duplicate, depending on whether Your Excellency wants to be coming from Florence or from Modena. All you have to do is take a stroll around the town. Count Mosca would be pleased if you would stay at the Albergo del Pellegrino, where the innkeeper is a friend of his.”
Fabrizio, seeming to be strolling at random, walked into the right-hand nave of the church to the place where his candles were lighted; his eyes were fixed on the Cimabue Madonna, and he said to Pepe as he knelt: “Just a moment, I must give thanks.”
Pepe did the same. As they left the church, Pepe noticed that Fabrizio gave a twenty-franc piece to the first poor man who asked him for alms; this beggar uttered cries of gratitude which attached to the heels of this charitable being swarms of the many paupers who ordinarily embellish the Piazza San Petronio. All wanted to have their share of the napoleon. The women, despairing of penetrating the crowd which surrounded him, hurled themselves upon Fabrizio, shrieking to him to tell whether he intended his napoleon to be divided among all God’s poor. Pepe, brandishing his gold-pommeled cane, ordered them to leave His Excellency in peace.
“Oh, Excellency,” all these women repeated still more shrilly, “give another gold napoleon for the poor women!”
Fabrizio increased his pace; the women following and shrieking, and many men as well running toward them through all the streets, made a sort of minor riot. This whole dreadfully filthy crowd energetically echoed the word: “Excellency!”
Fabrizio had great difficulty in releasing himself from this mob; the scene brought his imagination back to earth. “It’s only what I deserve,” he told himself, “rubbing elbows with the rabble.”
Two women followed him to the Saragossa gate, by which he left the city. Pepe halted them, seriously threatening them with his cane
and tossing them some coins. Fabrizio climbed the charming hillock of San Michele in Bosco, circled a section of the city outside the walls, followed a path which brought him five hundred paces out onto the Florence road, then re-entered Bologna and gravely presented to the police clerk a passport on which his description was minutely indicated. This passport identified him as Joseph Bossi, a student of theology. On it Fabrizio happened to notice a tiny fleck of red ink that appeared as though by accident on the lower right-corner of the sheet. Two hours later he had a spy on his heels, on account of the title
Excellency
which his companion had given him in the presence of the poor of San Petronio, though his passport bore none of the titles which afford a man the right to be called
Excellency
by his servants.
Fabrizio saw the spy and passed it off as a joke; he was no longer concerned about either the passports or the police, and like a child was entertained by everything. Pepe, who had been ordered to stay with him, observing how pleased he was with Ludovic, preferred to take such good news to the Duchess on his own. Fabrizio wrote two very long letters to the persons who were dear to him; then it occurred to him to write a third to the venerable Archbishop Landriani. This letter produced a wonderful effect, containing as it did a very precise account of the fight with Giletti. The good Archbishop, greatly moved, did not fail read the letter to the Prince, who was quite interested in hearing it, being rather curious to see how this young
Monsignore
managed matters so as to excuse so dreadful a murder. Thanks to the many friends of the Marchesa Raversi, the Prince, as well as the whole city of Parma, had believed that Fabrizio had obtained the assistance of twenty or thirty peasants to do away with a wretched actor who had the insolence to question his rights to little Marietta. In despotic courts, the first adroit intriguer controls the
truth
, as fashion controls it in Paris.
“What the Devil!” exclaimed the Prince to the Archbishop. “One gets someone to perform such actions; but to do them oneself is hardly the thing; moreover, one does not kill an actor like this Giletti, one buys him off.”
Fabrizio was far from suspecting what was going on in Parma. As a matter of fact, there was some question as to whether the death of this
actor, who in his life earned perhaps thirty-two francs a month, would bring down the
ultra
ministry and with it its leader, Count Mosca.
Upon learning of Giletti’s death, the Prince, stung by the airs of independence the Duchess was assuming, had ordered his Chief Justice Rassi to deal with the entire case as if it had concerned a Liberal. Fabrizio, for his part, supposed that a man of his rank was above the law; he did not consider that in countries where the great names are never subject to punishment, intrigue can accomplish everything, even against them. He frequently mentioned to Ludovic his “perfect innocence,” which would soon be proclaimed, his chief reason being that he was not guilty. Upon which Ludovic remarked to him one day: “I can’t understand how Your Excellency, who has so much native wit and education, can take the trouble to speak of such things to a man like myself, your devoted servant. Your Excellency is taking too many precautions. Such things had best be spoken in public or before a court.”
“This man regards me as a murderer and loves me none the less for it,” Fabrizio realized, suddenly struck down.
Three days after Pepe’s departure, he was quite amazed to receive an enormous letter sealed with a silk ribbon as in the days of Louis XIV and addressed to
His Most Reverend Excellency Monsignore Fabrizio del Dongo, First Grand Vicar of the Diocese of Parma, Canon
, and so on.
“But am I still all that?” he said to himself, laughing. Archbishop Landriani’s epistle was a masterpiece of clarity and logic; it consisted of no less than nineteen enormous pages, and described quite accurately what had taken place in Parma on the occasion of Giletti’s death.
A French army commanded by Marshal Ney and marching upon the town would not have produced a greater effect,
wrote the good Archbishop;
with the exception of the Duchess and myself, my dear son, everyone here believes that you gave yourself the pleasure of killing the actor Giletti. Had this misfortune fallen upon you, these are the sorts of things which are passed off with two hundred louis and an absence of six months; but the Raversi seeks to topple Count Mosca by means of this incident. It is not the horrible sin of murder which the public reproaches you for, but solely the clumsiness or rather the insolence of not having deigned to resort to a
bulo (a
sort of hired assassin
). I am translating for you here into explicit terms the talk which surrounds me, for since this forever-deplorable disaster, I visit every day some three of the most considerable houses of the town in order to have occasion to justify you. And never have I believed I made a holier use of what little eloquence Heaven has consented to grant me.
The scales fell from Fabrizio’s eyes; the Duchess’s many letters, filled with transports of friendship, never deigned to tell him such news. The Duchess swore she would leave Parma forever if he did not soon return to it in triumph.
“The Count will do for you everything humanly possible,” she wrote him in the letter that accompanied the Archbishop’s. “As for me, you have altered my character with this fine escapade of yours; I am now as avaricious as the banker Tombone; I have dismissed all my workmen, I’ve done more, I’ve dictated to the Count the inventory of my fortune, which turns out to be much less considerable than I had thought. After the death of the excellent Count Pietranera, which, parenthetically, you would have done much better to have avenged instead of exposing your life to such a creature as Giletti, I was left with an income of twelve hundred francs and five thousand francs of debts; I recall, among other things, that I had thirty pairs of white satin slippers from Paris and one pair of shoes to wear in the street. I have virtually made up my mind to take the three hundred thousand francs the Duke left me, a sum which I wished to devote exclusively to erecting a splendid tomb for him. Moreover, it is the Marchesa Raversi who is your chief enemy, which is to say mine; if you find it tedious being alone there in Bologna, you have only to say a word, and I shall come and join you. Here are four more bills of exchange, and so on.”
The Duchess did not breathe a word to Fabrizio of the opinion held in Parma of his affair; she wished above all to console him and, in any case, the death of so absurd a creature as Giletti hardly seemed to her of a nature to be seriously held against a del Dongo.
“How many Gilettis have our ancestors not sent to the next world,” she asked the Count, “without its occurring to anyone to blame them for it?”
Fabrizio, flabbergasted, and for the first time glimpsing the true state of affairs, began to study the Archbishop’s missive. Unfortunately, the Archbishop himself imagined him better informed than was actually the case. Fabrizio realized that what constituted the Marchesa Raversi’s special triumph was that it was impossible to find
de visu
witnesses of the fatal combat. The footman who first brought the news to Parma had been at the village inn at Sanguigna when it had occurred; little Marietta and the old woman who acted as her mother had vanished, and the Marchesa had bought the
vetturino
who drove the carriage and who had now made an abominable deposition.
Although the proceedings are surrounded by the deepest mystery,
wrote the good Archbishop in his best Ciceronian style
, and conducted by Chief Justice Russi, of whom Christian charity alone can restrain me from speaking evil, but who has made his fortune by oppressing the wretched victims of justice even as a greyhound pursuing a hare; though this Rassi, I say, whose turpitude and venality cannot, by your wildest imagination, be exaggerated, has been granted control of the case by a vexed Prince, I have managed to read the vetturino’s three depositions. By a signal stroke of fortune, this wretched person has contradicted himself. And I shall add, because I am speaking here to my Vicar General, to the person who, after myself, is to have the charge of this diocese, I shall add that I have sent for the curate of the parish in which this strayed sinner resides. I may tell you, my dearest son, but under the secrecy of the confessional, that this curate already knows, through the vetturino’s wife, the number of scudi he has received from the Marchesa Raversi, and I dare not say that the Marchesa has insisted that he calumniate your name, but the fact is highly likely. The scudi were sent by a wretched priest who fulfills certain venal functions for this Marchesa, and whom I have been obliged to forbid to say Mass for the second time. I shall not weary you with the account of several further proceedings which you are entitled to expect of me and which, moreover, constitute a part of my duties. A canon, your colleague at the Cathedral, and one who, moreover, occasionally recalls a bit too vividly the influence he enjoys on account of his family’s wealth, of which, by divine permission, he has remained the sole heir, having allowed himself to say, at the house of Count Zurla, Minister of the Interior, that he regarded this trifle as proved against you (
he was speaking of the murder of the unfortunate Giletti
),
I have summoned to appear before me, and there, in the presence of my three other Vicars-General, of my Chaplain, and of two curates who happened to be in the antechamber, I requested him to communicate to us, his brethren, the elements of the complete conviction which he claimed he had acquired against one of his colleagues at the Cathedral; the wretched fellow has been able to articulate only inconclusive reasons; everyone has risen against him, and though I have not believed it necessary to add more than a very few words, he dissolved into tears and made us witnesses of the full confession of his complete error, whereupon I promised him secrecy in my name and in that of all the persons present at this meeting, though stipulating that he employ all the zeal at his command to rectify the false impressions most likely caused by the speeches made by him during the last fifteen days.
I shall not repeat to you, my dear son, what you must have known long since, which is to say that of the thirty-four peasants who are employed in the excavations undertaken by Count Mosca and whom the Raversi woman claims you paid to assist you in committing your crime, thirty-two were at the bottom of a ditch, entirely busy with their task, when you seized your hunting-knife and employed it to defend your life against the man who unexpectedly attacked you. The other two workmen, who were not in the excavations, shouted to the others:
Monsignore
is being murdered! Which cry alone reveals your innocence in all its purity. Imagine, then, that Chief Justice Rassi claims that these two men have vanished, and that moreover eight of the men who were in the ditch have been apprehended; at their first interrogation, six declared having heard the shout “
Monsignore
is being murdered!” By indirect means I have learned that in their fifth interrogation, which took place yesterday evening, five declared that they did not clearly recall whether they had distinctly heard this shout or if they had merely heard it described by one of their comrades. Orders have been given that I be informed as to the residence of these workmen, and their priests will make it quite clear to them that they will be damning their own souls if, in order to gain a few scudi, they permit themselves to alter the truth.