Fabrizio, as his eyes ran over the faces of the women listening to him, had for some time noticed a very pretty dark-complexioned countenance, and a pair of eyes that blazed. These splendid eyes were generally swimming in tears by the time he had reached the eighth or tenth sentence in his sermon. When Fabrizio was obliged to say things that were lengthy and wearisome to himself, he was rather fond of looking at this pretty head, the youth of which attracted him. He found out that the young lady was called Annetta Marini, the only child and heiress of the richest clothier in Parma, who had died some months previously.
Soon the name of Annetta Marini was on every one’s lips. She had fallen desperately in love with Fabrizio. When these wonderful sermons had begun, it had been already settled that she was to marry Giacomo Rassi, the eldest son of the Minister of Justice, a young man who had appeared by no means displeasing to her. But when she had heard Monsignore Fabrizio preach twice, she vowed she would not marry at all, and when she was asked the reason of this strange alteration, she replied that it was not worthy of any honest girl to marry one man when she felt she was desperately in love with another. At first her family vainly sought to discover who that other might be.
But the scalding tears Annetta shed during Fabrizio’s sermons put them on the track. When her mother and uncles asked her whether she loved Monsignore Fabrizio, she answered boldly, that, as the truth had been found out, she would not soil herself by telling a lie. She added that as she had no hope of marrying the man she adored, she was at all events resolved her eyes should no longer be offended by the sight of young Count Rassi’s ridiculous figure. Within two days the scorn thus cast on the son of a man who was the envy of the entire middle class was the talk of the whole town. Annetta Marini’s answer was reckoned delightful, and every soul repeated it. It was talked of at the Palazzo Crescenzi, as everywhere else.
Clelia took good care never to open her lips on such a subject in her drawing-room. But she questioned her waiting-woman, and on the following Sunday, after she had heard mass in the chapel within her palace, she took her waiting-woman with her in her carriage, and went to a second mass in the Signorina Marini’s parish church. Here she found all the fine gentlemen in the town, attracted by the same object. They were standing round the door. Soon a great stir among them convinced the marchesa that Signorina Marini was entering the church. From the place she occupied she could see her very well, and, pious though she was, she did not pay very much attention to the mass. Clelia thought this middle-class beauty wore a resolute look, which to her mind would only have been appropriate in a married woman of several years’ standing. Otherwise her figure and waist were admirably neat; and her eyes, as they say in Lombardy, seemed to hold conversations with everything they looked at.
Before mass was over the marchesa slipped out.
The very next day the habitués of the Palazzo Crescenzi, who came there every evening, were retailing another story of Annetta Marini’s absurdities. As her mother, fearing she might do something foolish, kept her very short of money, Annetta had gone to see the famous painter Hayez, who was then at Parma, decorating the drawing-room of the Palazzo Crescenzi, and had offered him a magnificent diamond ring given her by her father if he would paint her Monsignore del Dongo’s picture. But she desired the monsignore might be represented in ordinary black, and not in priestly garb. Consequently, on the previous evening, the fair Annetta’s mother had been greatly surprised and sorely scandalized at discovering a splendid picture of Fabrizio del Dongo, in the finest gold frame that had been gilded at Parma for the last twenty years, in her daughter’s chamber.
[6] Raised in a frown from intensity of search.