The duchess found herself in the presence of a very tall and thin woman, who had not reached the age of six-and-thirty, and who looked fifty. Her face, with its noble and regular features, might have been thought beautiful, in spite of a pair of large round eyes, out of which she could hardly see, if the princess had not grown so utterly careless of her personal appearance. She received the duchess with such evident shyness that certain of the courtiers, who hated Count Mosca, ventured to remark that the sovereign looked like the woman who was being presented, and the duchess like the sovereign who received her. The duchess, surprised and almost put out of countenance, did not know what terms she should employ to indicate the inferiority of her own position to that which the princess chose to take up. The only thing she could devise to restore some composure to the poor princess, who was really not lacking in intelligence, was to begin and carry on a long dissertation on the subject of botany. The princess really knew a great deal about the subject; she had very fine hot-houses filled with tropical plants. The duchess, while simply attempting to get out of her own difficulty, made a lasting conquest of the Princess Clara Paolina, who, timid and nervous as she had been at the opening of the audience, was so perfectly at her ease before its close that, contrary to every rule of etiquette, this first reception lasted no less than an hour and a quarter. The very next day the duchess purchased quantities of exotic plants, and gave herself out as a great lover of botany.
The princess spent all her time with the venerable Father Landriani, Archbishop of Parma, a learned and even a witty man, and a perfectly well-mannered man into the bargain. But it was a curious sight to see him, enthroned in the crimson velvet chair which he occupied by virtue of his office, opposite the arm-chair in which the princess sat, surrounded by her ladies of honour and her two ladies in waiting. The aged prelate, with his long white hair, was even more shy, if that were possible, than the princess. They met every day of their lives, and every audience began with a full quarter of an hour of silence—to such a point indeed, that one of the ladies in waiting, the Countess Alvizi, had become a sort of favourite because she possessed the knack of encouraging them to open their lips, and making them break the stillness.
To wind up her presentations, the duchess was received by the hereditary prince, who was taller than his father, and even shyer than his mother. He was sixteen years old, and an authority on mineralogy. When the duchess appeared he blushed scarlet, and was so put out that he was quite unable to invent anything to say to the fair lady. He was very good-looking, and spent his whole life in the woods with a hammer in his hand. When the duchess rose to her feet to bring the silent audience to a close,
“Heavens, madam,” he cried, “how beautiful you are!” and the lady who had been presented to him did not think the remark altogether ill-chosen.
The Marchesa Balbi, a young woman of five-and-twenty, might, some two or three years before the arrival of the duchess in Parma, have been quoted as a most perfect type of Italian beauty. She still had the loveliest eyes in the world, and the most graceful little gestures. But close observation showed her skin to be covered with innumerable tiny wrinkles, which made her into a young-looking old woman. Seen from a distance, in her box at the theatre, for instance, she was still beautiful, and the good people in the pit thought the prince showed very good taste. He spent all the evenings in the Marchesa Balbi’s house, but frequently without opening his lips, and her consciousness that the prince was bored had worried the poor woman into a condition of extraordinary thinness. She gave herself airs of excessive cleverness, and was always smiling archly. She had the most beautiful teeth in the world, and in season and out she endeavoured to smile people into the belief that she meant something different from what she was saying. Count Mosca declared it was this perpetual smile—while she was yawning in her heart—which had given her so many wrinkles. The Balbi had her finger in every business, and the state could not conclude a bargain of a thousand francs without a “remembrance,” so it was politely termed at Parma, for the marchesa. According to public report she had invested six millions of francs in England, but her fortune, which was certainly a thing of recent growth, did not really exceed one million five hundred thousand francs. It was to protect himself from her cunning and to keep her dependent on him that Mosca had made himself Minister of Finance. The marchesa’s sole passion was fear, disguised in the shape of sordid avarice. “I shall die destitute,” she would sometimes say to the prince, who was furious at the very idea. The duchess remarked that the splendid gilded antechamber of the Balbi’s palace was lighted by a solitary candle, which was guttering down on to a precious marble table, and her drawing-room doors were blackened by the servants’ fingers. “She received me,” said the duchess to her friend, “as if she expected me to give her a gratuity of fifty francs!”
The tide of these successes was somewhat checked by the reception the duchess received at the hands of the cleverest woman at the court of Parma, the celebrated Marchesa Raversi, a consummate intrigante, who led the party opposed to Count Mosca. She was bent on his overthrow, and had been so more especially during the last few months, for she was the Duke Sanseverina’s niece, and was afraid the charms of the new duchess might diminish her own share of his inheritance.
“The Raversi is by no means a woman to be overlooked,” said the count to his friend. “So great is my opinion of her capacity that I separated from my wife simply and solely because she insisted on taking one of the marchesa’s friends, the Cavaliere Bentivoglio, as her lover.”
The Marchesa Raversi, a tall, masterful woman, with very black hair, remarkable for the diamonds which she wore even in the daytime, and for the rouge with which she covered her face, had declared her enmity to the duchess beforehand, and was careful to begin hostile operations as soon as she beheld her. Sanseverina’s letters betrayed so much satisfaction with his embassy, and especially such delight in his hope of obtaining his much-coveted order, that his family feared he might leave part of his fortune to his wife, on whom he showered a succession of trifling presents. The Raversi, though a thoroughly ugly woman, had a lover, Count Baldi, the best-looking man about the court. As a general rule she succeeded in everything she undertook.
The duchess kept up a magnificent establishment. The Palazzo Sanseverina had always been one of the most splendid in Parma, and the duke, in honour of his embassy and his expected decoration, was spending large sums on improvements. The duchess superintended all these changes.