"And you tell me this in the guard-room?" says the Conte, slightly taken aback!
This last expression is charming.
"It is because I am in a hurry," she says, "Rassi is on the track: but I have never spoken of insurrection, I abhor Jacobins. Think it over, and give me your advice after the play."
"I will give it you now," replies Mosca without hesitation. "You will buttonhole the Prince behind the scenes, make him lose his head, but without doing anything dishonourable, you understand."
The Duchessa is called to go on the stage, and returns behind the scenes.
Ferrante Palla's farewell to his idol is one of the finest things in this book, where there are so many fine things; but we come now to the capital scene, to the scene which crowns the work, to the burning of the papers in the case drawn up by Rassi, which the Grand Mistress obtains from Ranuccio-Ernesto V and the Princess Dowager, a terrible scene, in which she is now lost, now saved, at the whim of the mother and son who feel themselves overpowered by the force of character of this sort of Princesse des Ursins. This scene occupies only eight pages, but it is without parallel in the art of literature. There is nothing analogous to which it can be compared, it is unique. I say nothing of it, it is sufficient to draw attention to it. The Duchessa triumphs, she destroys the proofs and even carries away one of the documents for Mosca, who takes note of the names of some of the witnesses and cries: "It was high time, they were getting warm!" Rassi is in despair: the Prince has given orders for a retrial of Fabrizio's case. Fabrizio, instead of making himself a prisoner, as Mosca wishes, in the town prison, which is under the Prime Minister's orders, returns at once to his beloved citadel, where the General, who thought that his honour had been tarnished by the escape, rigorously confines him with the intention of getting rid of him. Mosca would have answered for him, with his life, in the town prison; but in the citadel Fabrizio is helpless.
This news comes as a bolt from the blue to the Duchessa: she remains speechless and unhearing. Fabrizio's love for Clelia bringing him back to the place where death lies in wait for him and where the girl will give him a moment's happiness for which he must pay with his life—the thought of this crushes her, and Fabrizio's imminent danger is the last straw.
This danger exists already, it is not created to fit the scene, it is the result of the passions aroused by Fabrizio during his former imprisonment, by his escape, by the fury of Rassi who has been forced to sign the order for a fresh trial. And so, even in the most minute details, the author loyally obeys the laws of the poetry of the novel. This exact observation of the rules, whether it come from the calculation, meditation, and natural deduction of a well chosen, well developed and fruitful subject, or from the instinct peculiar to talent, produces this powerful and permanent interest which we find in great, in fine works of art.
Mosca, in despair, makes the Duchessa understand the impossibility of getting a young Prince to believe that a prisoner can be poisoned in his State, and offers to get rid of Rassi.
"But," he tells her, "you know how squeamish I am about that sort of thing. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I still think of those two spies whom I had shot in Spain."